live laugh loaf

easy sourdough
mary grace
Published by Mary Grace Quigley

© 2022 Adelaide, Australia

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This book is dedicated to three important people/things:

1. My PhD thesis for making me procrastinate so much that I have produced this
entire book

2. COVID19 lockdown for turning our world upside down and finally giving me
the time to try out baking my own sourdough

3. Thomas, who has taken literally hundreds of photos of me with loaves of

bread!

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Contents
Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 9

THE BASICS .................................................................................... 11

About the sourdough process ............................................................................................. 12

Rules of thumb deciding when the dough is ready ........................................................... 13

Tools and ingredients for making bread ............................................................................. 15

Making sourdough starter from scratch ............................................................................. 20

Looking after your sourdough starter ................................................................................. 22

Taking a break from your sourdough starter ..................................................................... 26

Loaf sizes and making multiple loaves ............................................................................... 27

SOURDOUGH QUESTIONS............................................................... 29
Bread-terminology questions............................................................................................... 30

Starter questions ................................................................................................................... 35

Bread concerns ...................................................................................................................... 39

Choosing and finding flour to bake with ............................................................................ 42

Sourdough (wild yeast) vs. commercial yeast ................................................................... 45

Making the bread more or less sour.................................................................................... 48

SOURDOUGH HACKS ...................................................................... 50

Starter hacks .......................................................................................................................... 51

Dough and baking hacks ...................................................................................................... 53

SOURDOUGH AS ART ..................................................................... 58

Scoring sourdough bread ..................................................................................................... 59

Scoring design ideas............................................................................................................. 60

Making coloured loaves ........................................................................................................ 62

Marbled purple (Ube) sourdough bread .............................................................................. 64

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SOURDOUGH RECIPES .................................................................... 68
Easy sourdough recipe ......................................................................................................... 69

Backwards bread ................................................................................................................... 74

Notes on the backwards bread method .............................................................................. 76

Minimalist loaf ........................................................................................................................ 77

Fruit sourdough bread .......................................................................................................... 78

Olive loaf ................................................................................................................................. 80

Schwarzbrot mit Buttermilch (‘black’ rye bread with buttermilk) .................................... 83

Plain buttermilk sourdough with sunflower seeds ............................................................ 85

100% Spelt sourdough bread ............................................................................................... 87

Sourdough hot cross buns (with vegan option) ................................................................ 89

Seeded wholemeal sourdough bread.................................................................................. 93

Dark rye and caraway sourdough bread............................................................................. 96

Heavy buttermilch-quark (or yoghurt) Brot ........................................................................ 98

Seeded Brötchen (aka bread rolls) .................................................................................... 100

Fruit galettes......................................................................................................................... 104

Sourdough croissants......................................................................................................... 107

Vegan Kardamomschnecken (vegan cardamom scrolls) ............................................... 114

Simple sourdough focaccia................................................................................................ 117

Simple sourdough pizza ..................................................................................................... 119

Backwards Shokupan ......................................................................................................... 121

SOURDOUGH DISCARD RECIPES .................................................... 124

Wholemeal za’atar discard crackers ................................................................................. 125

Double chocolate sourdough discard cookies ................................................................ 127

GLUTEN FREE SOURDOUGH .......................................................... 130

Making gluten free starter from scratch ........................................................................... 131

Seedy sprouted gluten free sourdough ............................................................................ 132

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Chickpea gluten free sourdough loaf ................................................................................ 135

Lovely low FODMAP gluten free sourdough .................................................................... 137

Oat gluten free sourdough loaf .......................................................................................... 139

Gluten free fruit galettes ..................................................................................................... 143

ABOUT THIS BOOK ....................................................................... 149

About me, and Instagram, and this sourdough book...................................................... 150

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Introduction

Easy sourdough. Two words you don’t see together very often!

Most recipes for sourdough are very long and have a lot of details. The plethora
of information that inevitably comes with trying to make bread can give the
impression that if you don’t know all of the details, your bread won’t work out.

But this is most certainly not the case!

This little book will give you tips on how to fit sourdough into your everyday
life, and the little things you can do to make it work for you. Hopefully it will stop
you from doing things like getting up at 5am to feed your starter so that
everything will be perfectly timed for your loaf - or staying up till 3am with hourly
alarms to let your loaf finish proving! (I have done all these things and after
baking many, many loaves I have realised that they are truly unnecessary.) It
also gives you information about the many possibilities of sourdough once
you’ve figured out your routine.

Contrary to popular belief, sourdough is actually quite hard to stuff up.

Maybe it’s hard to achieve the perfect sourdough loaf; it’s also very difficult to
know what the perfect loaf even would be. However, what’s certain is that it is
not difficult to create a delicious, healthy bread. In fact, if you have a happy
starter and more or less follow the recipe, it is much harder not to!

I have split the recipes in this book up into parts so that you can see how flexible
it can be and how the actual making of the bread does not take up very
much of your own personal time.

Once you’ve made the dough, it’s up to you when you want to bake. You can
make multiple doughs on one occasion and then bake them throughout the
week, so you’ll have fresh bread all week. No amount of disorganisation can
stop the bread!!

I hope that this guide can show you how easy and enjoyable making sourdough
can be, and once you’ve grasped the basics of how to make bread, how many
different, delicious sourdough variants you can make.

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10
The basics
Getting started: the sourdough process, tools and
ingredients you’ll need, how to look after your sourdough
starter, and my easy sourdough recipe.

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About the sourdough process

Knowing a little about what’s actually happening when you bake a loaf of bread can
be really helpful because you’ll notice that most sourdough recipes make you make a
lot of decisions based on the environment on that particular day. Understanding the
process helps you to make those decisions.

When you mix your starter with flour, water and salt, you begin the process of
fermentation (aka proofing, or dough development) whereby the wild yeast in your
sourdough starter starts to ‘eat’ or ‘predigest’ the flour.

As the yeast does its work of ‘eating’ the flour, it releases gases, which create the air
bubbles in your loaf. This process also gives the dough a different flavour, think about
the difference between the flavour of bread and say, a scone. The scone is not
fermented and the bread is, hence the different flavour.

When the dough is developing, you want to allow it to develop as much as possible
because this allows for maximum airiness and maximum flavour. But you don’t want it
to overdevelop (aka overproof).

If the yeast is left to its own devices at room temperature for too long with the flour, it
will eventually eat through all of the parts of the dough that allow it to hold the air,
which means your loaf will no longer be able to rise.

When you make bread, you’re always trying to find that perfect middle point between
over and underproved. The good news is that with sourdough the process happens
much more slowly than it generally does with yeast, so theoretically it’s harder to miss
that point. And note also that that point is more spread out across time because the
process is so slow. Think of proofing as a spectrum rather than clear cut categories.
Perfectly proved is when your loaf has a good amount of air trapped inside, even holes,
good flavour development, and it rises when you bake it.

How to make decisions about timing for your bread dough based on the weather
Now you know that your dough has to develop and that you need to decide when it’s
ready.
Sourdough is very responsive to the weather. In warmer weather (e.g. 24C+) it will
develop quickly. In cooler weather (e.g. under 20C) it will develop more slowly.
Humidity also plays an important role. The higher the humidity, the quicker the
process.
So whenever you make a loaf, you always need to think about the weather. A food
thermometer can be very helpful when you start out to actually work out what
temperature your dough is. I found my guesses have often been quite incorrect.
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Rules of thumb deciding when the dough is ready
My rules of thumb (on the next page) are no way set in stone and will vary depending
on the humidity that day and also depending on your starter and flour. But they work
nicely as a general guide, which is what you need when you’re starting out.
I tend to use the temperature and time to help me judge when my dough is ready more
than I do its texture or appearance as I find they can vary a lot if you’re using different
flours etc. and so they can be misleading.
For example, you might have heard of the ‘poke test’ where you poke the dough and
see how quickly it springs back (you want it to spring back slowly but not too slow) – I
feel like my dough always springs back the same!
There are, however, a few visual and tactile indicators that are useful to know about
because they show that your dough is either well developed or on its way to being well
developed:
• bubbles – these are a good sign that your dough is developing, but they don’t
necessarily mean that it’s ready yet
• smooth, elastic dough – this is a good sign that your dough is on its way to
being nicely proved but also doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ready
Signs that your dough is overdeveloped (too much time at room temperature):
• very sticky dough
• dough that has lost its structure, maybe could be described as ‘soupy’ or runny
• dough that breaks when you try to shape it
• dough that deflates when you score it before baking
• dough that won’t hold its shape
• dough that spreads out when you tip it out of the banneton

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Temperature rules of thumb
These time suggestions are for the majority of recipes in this book which use about
20% starter (in baker’s percentages). You can manipulate the time needed for a loaf
to develop by increasing (to speed up the process) or decreasing (to slow down the
process) the amount of starter in the recipe.
For example, if it’s very hot weather, you might choose to halve the amount of starter
in a recipe to make sure that the bread doesn’t prove too quickly.
Note that for enriched dough, that is doughs that contain milk, butter and oil, the
proofing times will be longer.

Temperature Sourdough reaction

1-4C You can leave the dough in the fridge at this temperature for
multiple days and it will more or less ‘pause’ the fermentation
process. Sour flavour will develop.

5-11C Little fermentation happens, enough that your dough can

overprove if you leave it at this temperature for a long time, but
somehow it’s also not the right temperature for your dough to
ever develop nicely if it is left only at this temperature.

12-15C Not ideal for dough development, it will happen very slowly.

16C-21C Dough can develop nicely at this temperature. It will happen

more slowly, allow around 8-11 hours, or slightly shorter if you
plan to put the dough in the fridge afterwards.

22C-26C Dough really likes this temperature. Your starter and your
dough will both get bubbly in this kind of weather, it’s ideal for
making bread. Allow around 5-8 hours for dough to develop,
slightly sorter if you plan to put the dough in the fridge
afterwards.

26C+ Dough can still be quite happy at higher temperatures, you just
can’t leave it alone for too long or it will overdevelop. Around 3-
5 hours will likely suffice for your loaf – adjust according to
whether you want to put the dough in the fridge afterwards.

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Tools and ingredients for making bread
Tools

• Mixing bowl
I use big metal mixing bowls that I got from Ikea.

• Tea towels
Numerous tea towels are good. You will need a clean one for covering the
dough, and more for wiping your hands as you wet and dry them heaps of times
throughout the process.

• Electronic scales
You can’t use cups to measure - you need the scales! Trust me!! The good
news is that you can get these quite cheaply from most supermarkets and
department stores.

• Dutch oven (approx. 5L capacity, i.e. standard size)

A Dutch oven is a cast iron pot with a lid. I highly recommend the Lodge 3.2
Quart Combo Cooker (42cm x 26cm x 12cm). This is a great size and shape
and holds its heat really well.
I also use a pot I got from Kmart (16.5cm x 30.5cm x 24cm, 4L capacity) – the
bread doesn’t get quite as lovely and brown in this pot as it does in the Lodge,
but it still comes out great. They’ve also got affordable Dutch ovens at Ikea.

If you don’t have a Dutch oven but really want to bake straight away, you can
also try using a large casserole dish or an oven tray with a pot turned upside
down on top. It just needs to be something that can keep the heat and steam
inside. (Or you can actually bake without one at all - see under ‘Baking without
a Dutch oven’).

• A very sharp knife or razor blade (try searching Google for Astra razor blades)
You use this to score (put a cut in) the dough before you cook it, so that it can
expand. You could also use a very sharp, clean Stanley knife here. Very sharp
is the key thing, whatever you want to use! (more info on scoring in ‘Sourdough
as art’ section). I keep my blade inside a purpose made holder called a UFO
lame from Wire Monkey Shop. This makes it a lot safer to hold and use. I highly
recommend getting one!

• A good pair of oven mitts

You are going to be handling your Dutch oven and it’s going to be very very
hot. Get some really heavy-duty, long oven mitts that cover your arms properly
and avoid getting a ‘bread tattoo’ like I did! Google ‘BBQ 500 Degrees oven
mits’ and you should find something similar to mine.
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an old fashioned razor blade

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Ingredients

• Baker’s flour, aka ‘bread flour’ if you’re in the US

You can also bake with pizza flour, wholemeal flour, spelt, rye flour – any type
of flour that has at least 10g of protein per 100g. You can check by looking at
the back of the bag.

• Sourdough starter
Sourdough starter, also sometimes referred to as just starter or just sourdough,
is a form of natural yeast that you keep alive in liquid form (as opposed to dry
yeast which you can keep in powdered form). Starter is what makes your bread
rise and gives it its nice sourdough flavour.

To get starter, I suggest asking around - you probably know someone who has
some, or who knows someone! You only need about 5g of starter to start
baking. I feel like it’s not really something you should pay any money for – I
would be very surprised if you were unable to find someone willing to give you
a little bit of their starter for free! You can also make your own, see the
instructions in the next section.

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Ideal Items (Nice to have, but not essential) for making bread
Tools
• Food thermometer
You can find these cheaply at supermarkets. They help so much when
working out what is happening with your dough, especially when the
weather changes and your bread is suddenly different and you don’t know
why! The ideal temperature for your dough to prove at is 22-26 degrees. If
it’s much cooler or warmer than this, the process will happen a fair bit more
quickly or slowly (see rules of thumb).

• Proofing basket
You can use a bowl with a tea towel in it instead, but a proofing basket is
what professional bakers use when they put dough into the fridge to rest
overnight. They have a special shape and material that allows more air in
and helps your bread to form a good crust. Your bread will also be totally
fine without one!

I spent many many hours researching sizes of proofing baskets, and

remember being totally overwhelmed, so here are the baskets I’ve got:

o Oval shaped basket with a liner (good because it fits into the fridge
easily) (21cm x 14cm x 8cm)
o Round shaped basket with a liner (a good shape for drawing cute
designs on the bread) (20cm x 8cm)

• Spray bottle filled with water

You can use this to help to create more steam and therefore more oven
spring (i.e. higher, fluffier bread) when you’re about to bake.

• Dough scraper
Helpful when shaping the dough into a ball but I usually just use my hands.

• Dough whisk
Having a dough whisk means you don’t need to get dough all over your
hands when you first mix your ingredients together. I actually got sent a
bread whisk in the post by accident instead of a bread lame I’d ordered - but
it is so handy, I really recommend getting one. I mix everything by hand and
it would be sooo much harder if I didn’t have one of these!

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Non-essential but useful ingredients

• Rice flour
Rice flour is a really great type of non-stick flour. I always use it whenever
I’m shaping my bread, as well as lining my banneton or bowl before putting
the dough into the fridge. It doesn’t become sticky when it gets wet like
regular flour does, so it makes it extra easy to work with.

• Different types of flour to bake with

You can start out with just baker’s flour but it’s really enjoyable to try out
baking with different types of flour (like wholemeal, rye or spelt) and see how
your bread changes and which ones you like the flavour of.

It’s a good idea to start out using a majority (at least 60%) of baker’s flour
and then adding in some other types - rather than using 100% rye flour, for
example – but there’s nothing to say that you can can’t do this! I suggest
checking your local bulk / health food store and buying a little of each to try
out.

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Making sourdough starter from scratch
My suggestion is to get some starter from someone else. There’s always someone
around who has some – there are Facebook groups and Gumtree ads and everything.
There will probably be someone who has a lot of lovely bread advice they can give
you too! But if you decide to make your own, for whatever reason, this is how you can
do it.

Daily feeding ingredients

20g rye flour

30g baker’s flour
50g water
¼ tsp honey (optional, or substitute with molasses for a vegan alternative)

Day 1
Find a tall or Weck-style jar and mix all the ingredients together inside it.
Put the lid on loosely but make sure it isn’t 100% airtight. Allow a little bit of air to get
in. Leave it at room temperature for 24 hours.

Day 2
Mix the mixture in your jar around, but don’t do anything else. Do not add or discard
anything, just give it a mix. Leave it at room temperature for 24 hours.

Day 3
Discard about 60g of the mixture and add all of the ingredients above again. Mix
everything together. Then leave at room temperature for 24 hours.

Day 4 - 10
Continue discarding and feeding the ingredients above for about another 7 days (so
about 10 days in total), after which time your starter should be strong enough to bake
with. You can stop adding the honey around the 4-7 day mark (it won’t matter too much
when you decide to stop doing this). You’ll notice your starter doesn’t get as bubbly as
quickly without the honey.

Your starter is ready when it can rise and get bubbly within 4-6 hours of you feeding it
without you having added the honey. It will get stronger and stronger as time goes on.
Your first bakes might not get quite as much rise as you expect them to, but they will
still be good and will keep getting better and better.

If your bread seems kind of like damper, it means your starter wasn’t ready yet. Just
keep feeding it for another few days and give it another go. It will get there eventually.
If it’s really warm weather (26 degrees plus) you should feed it twice a day
instead of once. So the steps are once every 12 hours instead of once every day.

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This means it’ll be ready to bake with in half the time! If you are busy and can’t
do that, put it into the fridge to ‘pause’ the process for half the day.

After 10 days, you can decide whether you want to keep the starter in the fridge most
of the time or if you’re going to leave it at room temperature and feed it daily. See the
‘Looking after your sourdough starter’ section of this book for information that will
help you to decide.

A note on flour:
You can actually use any flour you like but rye seems to be very potent so I like to use
it when making a starter.

If you decide to use, for example, plain flour only and then notice you aren’t having
any success, no bubbles are forming in your jar after a few days, something that often
mysteriously fixes the problem is changing the type of flour you are using. Just go and
get some different flour, any – a different brand, wholemeal, anything, just something
different and give it a go. Quite often, incidentally it might be fresher flour, having more
natural yeast already alive and ready to come to life inside your starter jar.

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Looking after your sourdough starter

The starter is probably the most important part of your entire bread. It gives your bread
its sour flavour and also makes it rise.

A short Google search will make clear that there is no single way to maintain a starter
– there are many options and ways to do it.

For a very long time I actually refused to put my starter in the fridge because I was
convinced that I would get better results if I left it out at room temperature and fed it
every day. Reading online had given me the impression that keeping it in the fridge
would make it weaker and it would take a few feeds to bring it back to life. I managed
to keep my starter feeding up quite consistently, leaving it at room temperature, until
it got to Australian summer and feeding once a day just wasn’t enough. I ended up
with a few really flat breads because there was a build up of acid in my starter, despite
daily feeding.

So I have changed my method to leave the starter in the fridge all the time, and my
breads have been as good as ever, if not better.

Below is information about what I do with my starter and why I do it this way.

Feeding your starter step by step

When you make your bread dough, you want the starter you put in to be puffy and
bubbly. To get it to this state you need to feed it with flour and water. If you’ve been
keeping your starter in the fridge it might already be at this stage and you won’t need
to feed it again before baking (more on this below).

However, if your starter doesn’t have many bubbles and is looking fairly flat, you will
need to feed it before you bake.

Follow the steps below.

1. Discard all but about 5-10g of starter (this will literally be the scrapings of the
jar you’ve had it in)
2. Add 50g of room temperature water
3. Add 50g of flour
4. Mix it until you can’t see any flour
5. Leave it at room temperature for 4-10 hours, depending on the weather

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A few hours after feeding, the starter will grow in size and get bubbly. Usually it should
double in size, but if it doesn’t quite get that far, that’s ok. When you scoop it up with
a spoon you can see that gluten structure has developed, as little holes will have
appeared. This means your starter is ready to use.

If you can see it has risen and has started to go back down, it’s not quite the optimum
time to use the starter, but it will still make your bread rise - just not as much as if you
used it at its peak. If there are no bubbles left and your starter seems flat and mushy,
feed it again before using it to make dough or your dough likely won’t get a lot of rise.

You can feed your starter with any flour you like. It’s good to use a high protein flour
like baker’s flour or a whole wheat flour, or a combination of them, because this flour
is going to end up in your bread - so you want it to be nice and strong (protein helps
the bread to be stronger and to hold its shape). I often use whole wheat flour. If you’ve
run out of everything and only have regular plain flour, that’ll do the job of keeping your
starter alive too.

If you notice your starter isn’t rising as much as you want it to, you could try adding a
little rye to it. I’ve heard rye has something special in it that helps more than other
flours with fermentation. Personally, I don’t notice much of a difference in the final
result of my breads depending on what flour I’ve used in my starter, so just use
whatever flour is convenient for you.

starter that’s not ready (left) vs. starter that’s ready (right)

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A note on keeping your starter in the fridge

If you aren’t baking every single day (or, in my opinion, even if you are!), it is so much
more convenient and gives you so much more control to keep your starter in the fridge.
I usually keep about 220g of starter in the fridge at any one time. This is enough for
me to spontaneously make two loaves. If you only ever make one loaf at a time, aim
to keep about 110g grams of starter in the fridge.

Putting your starter in the fridge presses pause on the fermentation process. So if you
let your starter rise to close to its peak and then put it in the fridge, you can pause it at
its peak. (Specifically, just before its peak is ideal – because it will keep rising for a
little while once you put it in the fridge.) Then you can leave it in the fridge like this for
up to a week and bake with it straight away. This is great because it cuts a good 5-6
hours out of the bread making process, as you don’t have to worry about feeding the
starter before you can bake the bread.

You will know that your starter is still good to use for baking without feeding again if
you can see lots of lovely bubbles.

Another nice thing about keeping the starter in the fridge is that because you can use
the starter in your bread dough straight away instead of discarding it, there’s much
less waste.

I usually use the starter that I’ve had in the fridge for up to a week directly in my bread.
I leave about 20g in the jar (I never measure it, but a small spoon-sized amount) and
feed it with 100g water and 100g of flour. I let my starter rise while my bread is rising,
for about 4-6 hours. When the bread is close to being done, I put the starter back into
the fridge and leave it there until next time I bake.

Having the starter nearby while your breads are rising is also a helpful way to gauge
how close to being fully proved your bread is. The bread will usually be ready and rise
at a similar speed to your starter – but it’s sometimes easier to recognise in the starter
(because you can see all the bubbles in the jar), than it is with the bread( where the
bubbles are often hidden inside).

If your starter has been in the fridge for a while it might form a little layer of water on
top. This is fine -either tip it out or mix it back into the starter, it’s not a problem either
way.

You can keep the starter in the fridge without feeding it for at least a couple of weeks.
The longest I’ve left mine is two weeks, but I’ve heard of people leaving theirs much,
much longer! Keeping starter in the fridge basically sends the bacteria in your starter
that cause the fermentation to happen into hibernation. This is why you can keep both

24
your starter and your bread dough in the fridge for quite a while without too much
changing.

Keeping your starter at room temperature, outside of the fridge

Some people like to keep their starter at room temperature all the time and that’s fine
too. I advise against this if the temperature in your kitchen is over 27 degrees and
you’re not planning on feeding the starter at least twice a day. But otherwise, if you
have time, go for it. It is fun to keep feeding the starter and watching it change!

Aim to feed it at least once every day. If you forget for a day, don’t worry; your starter
will still be fine but you might need to feed it a few times before using it to make loaves!

To feed your starter, do the following:

1. Discard all but about 5-10g of starter (this will literally be the scrapings of the
jar you’ve had it in)
2. Add 50g of room temperature water
3. Add 50g of room temperature flour
4. Mix it
5. Leave it at room temperature

You’ll be able to leave your starter longer without feeding in winter. If it’s summer and
fairly warm in your kitchen, the starter will go past its peak quickly and become more
acidic, with a stronger yoghurty / acidic smell. If you notice this happening, you might
have to feed it more often (like every 12 hours). Or just put it in the fridge!

If you’re keeping your starter this way, it’s really important that you discard enough of
it. The more you discard, the more fresh food there is for your starter to eat. Discarding
more helps your starter to become stronger and stops acid from building up. If too
much acid builds up in the starter, it will stop gluten from developing properly when
you make your dough and your bread won’t rise when you bake it.

Each time you use your starter in a loaf, leave at least 5g in the jar. Just add 50g of
water and 50g of flour to the leftover bit you’ve got to keep your starter going. If you
are feeding your starter just to keep it alive, but not actually planning on baking,
you can feed it less flour (e.g. 5g discard, 20g water, 20g flour.)

If you are really busy or going away and know you won’t be able to feed it for a few
days, just put it in the fridge.

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Taking a break from your sourdough starter

Drying out your starter to preserve it

If you are going away for a longer time and you want to ‘save’ some of your starter,
you can also keep a dry version of it.

1. Spread your starter out thinly onto a piece of baking paper. Place another piece
of baking paper over the top and using a rolling pin to roll it out so the starter is
spread thinly between the two pieces of paper.
2. Then simply let it dry out completely at room temperature. This might take a few
days, depending on the weather.
3. Once it’s completely dried out, break it into pieces put the little flakes into an
airtight container. You can keep these flakes indefinitely.

I’ve done this with my starter because I am afraid that I will somehow accidentally kill
it or bake all of it and wash out the jar it lives in or something. I like having the dried
version of my starter for peace of mind, although I’ve never actually needed to use it.
It’s also nice to be able to give to people if they want to start baking sourdough!

Bringing the dried starter back to life

To bring your dried starter back to life:

1. Take a few flakes, enough to fill the bottom of a glass (e.g. 5-10 grams) and
pour about 30 grams of water over them. The water can be lukewarm to speed
up the process, but not hot.
2. Leave your glass for a few hours so that the flakes start to soften and dissolve
into the water. You can stir them around to help this happen more quickly.
3. Once the flakes have more or less dissolved, add 50g of flour and 50g of water
as you normally would when feeding your starter.
4. You should start seeing it rise and fall as per usual after feeding.

I would recommend feeding for a few days, perhaps up to a week before baking with
it. You want to see it rising and falling in a predictable way – that’s how you’ll know it’s
ready to bake with.

26
Loaf sizes and making multiple loaves

It takes a little bit of time baking to work out what the perfect sized loaf is for you and
your family / friends. My easy sourdough recipe makes a larger loaf, and it’s also really
handy to work with round numbers for ingredient amounts, because they are easy to
remember! As you might have noticed in the Easy Sourdough Recipe, you can divide
the dough in half and bake two small loaves (step 6).

Most regular home ovens can fit two Dutch ovens inside at once. It took me ages to
work this out, but I was so happy when I did because now I always bake (at least) one
loaf for myself and one to give away to a friend or a family member! If you have two
Lodge Combo Cookers, they will easily fit stacked on top of each other in your oven -
just put a tray in the middle of the oven and one directly on the bottom of the oven.

My friends don’t eat as much bread as me and they said that the Easy Sourdough
Recipe sized loaves were too big for them (the final loaf is about 1kg). I’ve recently
been making loaves that are a bit smaller, but not as small as half of the Easy
Sourdough Recipe.

Below are ingredient amounts you’ll need for different sizes of loaves. Try out different
sizes and see what works best for you. Surprisingly the baking time for all of them is
about the same - maybe 5 minutes quicker once you’ve taken the lid off for the small
loaves. Just keep an eye on them and take them out when they look lovely and brown.

Small (500g) Medium (750g) Large (1kg)

50g sourdough starter 80g sourdough starter 100g sourdough starter
185g water 285g water 370g water
5g salt 8g salt 10g salt
200g baker’s flour 300g baker’s flour 400g baker’s flour
60g spelt, rye or 80g spelt, rye or 120g spelt, rye or
wholemeal flour wholemeal flour wholemeal flour

I usually make three medium sized loaves at once because this amount fits perfectly
into my large metal Ikea mixing bowl. Then I bake two at once and leave one in the
fridge for a few days and bake it when I run out of bread. The amounts for three loaves
are below (I changed the ratios of baker’s flour and whole wheat flour to make it easier
to remember.) Mix together, follow the instructions of the Easy Sourdough Recipe as
normal. When you get to Step 6 of making the dough, split the dough into three before
you shape it.

Three medium loaves

240g starter
855g water
24g salt
1kg baker’s flour
125g spelt / rye or wholemeal flour

27
28
Sourdough
questions
Answers to my own Google searches as well as some failed
experiments, so you don’t have to do them!

29
Bread-terminology questions
Clarity on some confusing, fancy bread terminology
What is crumb?
The crumb frequently referred to in Instagram’s ‘crumb shots’ is basically just the holes
that appear in the bread. Ideally the crumb should be open, meaning that the holes
are relatively big but also similarly sized and spread out. Crumb can tell you how well
proved your dough was (see notes on over and under-proved dough below). But if
your bread tastes good and doesn’t have big holes, it really isn’t that important!! If you
are baking with whole wheat or rye flour, your bread will always have less open crumb
than using a high percentage of baker’s flour. This doesn’t mean your bread was over
or under-proved – it’s just how bread made with this kind of flour comes out.

What is hydration?
Hydration refers to how much water is in the dough. This is usually described as a
percentage. High hydration dough has a percentage around 80% or above. This dough
is often harder to handle but is required to get those really big holes that you’ll see in
many beautiful photos of sourdough online. Most of the recipes in this book are around
76% hydration. The percentage is calculated by dividing the amount of water in the
recipe by the amount of flour. So if I have 100g of flour and 80g of water, my hydration
will be 80%. These percentages are referred to as baker’s percentages.

What are baker’s percentages?

Baker’s percentages are weird and don’t actually add up to 100% when you add the
ingredients together. All the percentages are calculated as a percentage of how much
flour is in the recipe. Don’t let that freak you out. They make it easier to scale recipes
up or down.

What is bulk fermentation?

This is the period of time from when you mix the dough until you put it into the fridge.
It is the time that your dough spends at room temperature. Some people also call this
the ‘first rise’. During bulk fermentation (or the first rise), you can manipulate the dough
so that it becomes stronger and develops the consistency you want it to have (fluffy,
soft, even holes) by doing various types of folds. Once this phase is over you let the
bread keep fermenting but you stop doing stuff to it - just let it rest. This is called
proving.

What is proving (or proofing)?

Proving is another word for developing. It’s what your bread dough does once you mix
all the ingredients together. It is the process of fermentation and gluten development
that you can visibly see happening from mixing all of the ingredients onwards –
changing in texture, becoming smoother and getting bigger, with the size of the air
bubbles increasing. In a way, it’s kind of like what happens when you cook something

30
and it changes in shape and colour and taste. Except proving happens very slowly
and usually at room temperature.

What is a cold proof?

Putting your dough into the fridge is a method of proving dough called a cold proof or
a cold retard. This is sometimes also referred to as the ‘second rise’. While the ‘first
rise’ happens at room temperature, you can put your dough into the fridge following
the first rise and it will continue rising, although more slowly because of the lower
temperature and much slower rate of fermentation. I almost always do a cold proof
because this allows the dough to develop a beautiful sour flavour. If you want your
dough to be more sour, leave it in the fridge for longer. If you want it to be less sour,
leave it in the fridge for less time or not at all. You can always leave the cold proof out
of the recipe entirely, just giving your dough a few extra hours of proving time at room
temperature instead. This will be the equivalent of having left it for 8-12 hours in the
fridge and the flavour will be a little less sour, which some people prefer.

What is over- and underproving?

Just-right bread has evenly spaced, evenly sized holes. If the dough is left out too
long, the gluten structures start to break down and it becomes over-proved. Bread that
is over-proved will generally be quite flat with small and honey comb like holes. Under-
proved bread (i.e. bread that hasn’t had enough time to develop) will have some large
but uneven holes.

There might be a few really big holes and then lots of small dense holes in the rest of
the bread. It will usually look really great when it comes out of the oven and you’ll only
realise there’s a problem when you cut it. If you notice either of these issues happening
with your bread, it might be because the weather has changed and you need to give
your bread more or less proving time. Using a thermometer to see the temperature of
your dough can be really helpful for working out how quickly the dough is fermenting.

What is oven spring?

Oven spring is when the bread rises when you first start baking it. You need the oven
to be really hot and some steam inside your Dutch oven for this to happen. It happens
within the first 15 minutes of baking, after which the outside of the dough becomes
hard and can’t rise anymore. You can also influence oven spring by building radial
dough tension, meaning that you are always pulling the dough in the same direction
when you are doing your folds during bulk fermentation.

What is an ear?
An ear is the little bit of dough that sticks up (and looks like an ear!) if you score (cut)
your dough with a super sharp razor blade before putting it into the oven to bake. This
is very sought-after in the bread world. If your bread has good oven spring, you’re
more likely to get a good ear on your bread, but if you don’t use a sharp razor, even if
your bread has great oven spring, you probably still won’t get an ear.
31
overproved

underproved

just right

32
What is the perfect loaf?
When I started baking this was a question I just couldn’t figure out the answer to! What
is the bread actually supposed to be like? Is my bread good? How do I make it better?

First I want to tell you the answer I found for myself to this question: The perfect loaf
is a loaf that you can make regularly, that fits into your life and your schedule, that
doesn’t make you feel stressed, that doesn’t make you stay up until 12am waiting for
it to be finished or stop you from seeing your friends (all things I have done for bread!!).
The perfect loaf is one that tastes good to you! The perfect loaf is one that you want
to eat for breakfast and one that you can share with your friends and family. That’s it.
That’s all the perfect loaf is.

Okay, but for those of you who want to know what a professional definition of the
perfect loaf is for bakers, this is what I’ve been able to gather from a lot of research
online: The perfect loaf is well-proved, meaning that it has even and open holes inside.
It is not too sour but still has developed flavour complexity (meaning you have let it
develop flavour in the fridge but not for too long, where it becomes more sour – which
I personally really enjoy, but officially this is not a quality of perfect bread). The perfect
loaf rises and has a nice neat ear when you bake it. Its texture is soft and not gummy.

But it’s up to you to decide what your perfect loaf looks and tastes like.

33
If this happens to your starter do not be alarmed. It actually means your starter is very
healthy and happy. You just need a bigger jar to give it more room to grow.

34
Starter questions
Knowledge from many many Google searches and personal
experiments
Do I need to clean the jar each time I feed my starter?
No, you don’t. You can leave it for ages. Try and scrape off the grimey bits on the
sides as much as you can but it will be totally fine in the same glass for up to a month
(or longer?). Make sure you use clean utensils to mix the starter in and if you’re
touching anything with your fingers, make sure your hands are clean. That said, you
can change the jar each time you feed your starter too, it won’t bother it. You can do
whatever you prefer.

What kind of jar should I use?

Make sure your jar is a tall one, with a lid so that your starter can rise and so that it
has enough air. If your jar is too small and is truly airtight it just won’t rise. If it’s not
quite air-tight and is too small, your starter is going to start oozing out of the edges.
Either way, the taller your jar the better. It shouldn’t be perfectly air-tight but it
should have some kind of lid so that random stuff can’t fall in. A little bit of air
needs to be able to get in so that the fermentation process can happen. It’s also handy
to have a weck-style jar with a wide opening. It makes it much easier to clean and get
the starter out.

Do I need to measure how much starter I leave in?

You don’t need to measure exactly how much starter you leave in or discard, but you
will be surprised at how little you need to leave in. A lot of people think it will be better
to leave more in or that their starter might die if they throw away too much, but actually
the opposite is the case. See the answer to the next question!

Do I really need to discard so much starter?

Yes you do, if you are keeping it outside of the fridge. If you don’t like discarding so
much starter, keep it in the fridge and then you won’t have to! You can keep your
discard and actually put it back into the bread (see later in this book for more details
on this). It would be easy to assume that leaving more starter in would be good, but
your old starter contains lots of hungry bacteria. If there are only a few of them and
lots of flour, then they can get stronger, but if there are lots of hungry bacteria because
you’ve only discarded a little bit of old starter, the new flour you put in gets eaten up
much more quickly. I spent a long time not throwing away very much of my starter
because I hated how wasteful it seemed, but when I started discarding more, my bread
just got so much better!

Can I feed my starter too often?

Generally speaking, the more often you feed your starter the stronger it will get. That
said, you should wait for it to start to rise to its peak before you feed it again. But you

35
can feed it multiple times a day, if you’re keeping it at room temperature and you have
the time!

Why does my starter smell weird?

It’s okay, it’s actually supposed to because it’s fermented. It might have a bit of a
yoghurty smell. Also if it has a little liquid on top this is totally fine - just tip it off. The
only time you need to be worried is if your starter is mouldy. If you find any mould on
your starter you can’t save it and you should throw it away.

How do I know when the starter is ready to bake with?

When it’s ready your starter should rise up and get bubbly, looking similar to pancake
batter. It should about double in size – once it has doubled you can use it for baking.
Actually, you can pretty much use it any time after a few hours post-feeding. When it’s
risen is the best time to use it, as it will help your bread rise the most. If it hasn’t quite
risen all the way it will still help your bread rise, but your bread might not have as much
sour flavour. If it has started to sink down again and is past its peak, your bread might
be a bit more dense and have a bit of a stronger sour flavour.

Can I feed less starter if I’m not going to bake that day?
If you want to you can definitely feed it less, by using 20g each of flour and water
instead of 50g.

I want to bake heaps of bread. How do I get all the starter I’ll need for all my
loaves?
If you want to bake lots of bread but only have a little bit of starter that is absolutely no
problem at all. All you need to do is work out how much starter you will need for the
amount of bread you want to bake and feed your starter accordingly. See the
calculations below.

Amounts to feed starter on the day you’re baking:

1 loaf
Scrapings of starter in the jar e.g. 5-10g
50g flour
50g water
2 loaves
Scrapings of starter in the jar e.g. 5-10g
100g flour
100g water
3 loaves
Scrapings of starter in the jar, maybe a bit more this time, e.g. 10-15g
150g flour
150g water

36
This will leave you with the amount you need for the recipe, plus 5-10g of scrapings
left over in the jar. Once you’ve used the starter for your dough, feed the leftover starter
in your jar again with 50g flour and 50g of water, let it rise and then put it back into the
fridge (or leave it out, if you are feeding it daily).

37
38
Bread concerns
Contrary to popular belief, here are some things that (generally) won’t
ruin your bread, some of which I’ve already mentioned (but here is a
complete list!)

Not doing all the folds at exactly the right time

It’s fine. Try to do all the sets the recipe calls for, but if they end up being a bit out of
sync (one hour between one lot, then 1.5 hours between the next), don’t stress! You
could do the next lot in 45 minutes, or an hour, either way the bread will be fine.
Actually, you can skip most of the folds and as long as you leave the bread out for 4-
6 hours, depending on the weather, it will be totally fine!

Being slightly off in your measurements

If you’re a few grams over or under in any of your measurements of ingredients, that’s
okay! Note that the ingredient you want to be most careful with regarding
measurements is water. Adding more water can really change the way your dough
behaves and gives you a lot more bubbles in your dough. Too much water can make
your dough much harder to work with. Try to be as precise as you can with all your
ingredients, but don’t stress about a few grams over or under.

Forgetting how many coil folds you’ve done

It’s okay. Go for doing one round too many rather than one too few. I usually write
down in my phone the time that I started making the dough and I can work out from
that what set of folds I should be up to.

Forgetting to turn down the temperature of the oven after 10 minutes

I’ve forgotten this a million times. Just turn it down when you realise and keep an eye
on the loaf to make sure it doesn’t get too dark. You can take it out a bit earlier if you
think it looks ready.

Doing a bad job of scoring the bread

This doesn’t matter at all - your bread just won’t look quite as pretty.

Baking with starter that’s a bit past its peak or hasn’t quite peaked yet
You can use starter that has been fed up to 24 hours ago. It will still have enough
power to get your bread to rise, just not as much as if you’d use starter at its peak.
Older starter will give your bread a stronger sour flavour. You could give it a little extra
time (an extra hour) to do its thing when you initially mix all your ingredients together.
Using starter that hasn’t peaked yet (likely somewhere between 3-6 hours after
feeding) will also be fine; your bread will probably have heaps of oven spring but less
sour flavour. Either way, your bread will still taste great!

39
Using tap water
A lot of people have warned against this but I’ve tried it and noticed no difference at
all. Perhaps it would be different in different countries? It seems to work fine with
Adelaide tap water, which has quite a lot of chlorine in it! That said, if you have some
form of water filter, why not just use it anyway?

Putting the bread in when the oven isn’t quite hot enough yet
The bread will be fine. The hotter the oven is, the better your oven spring will be, which
is why recipes usually ask for you to let it get really hot, but you can actually put the
bread into the cold oven in a cold Dutch oven. Give it an extra 20 minutes or so and it
will still turn out great.

Cutting the bread while it’s still hot

You shouldn’t do this, but if you do the bread will still turn out fine! It will still taste good
and everyone knows that warm bread is one of the best things ever, so if you really
want to do it, just do it. If you can wait and let your loaf cool down though, it will continue
cooking once you take it out of the oven. If you cut it while it’s hot it might become a
bit more gummy, but if you’re going to eat it all while it’s hot then that doesn’t matter
anyway!

Keeping your loaf in plastic

Bread people hate plastic, myself included. Ideally the only time you would put your
finished loaf in plastic would be if you were going to freeze it. Plastic won’t exactly ruin
the bread but it will make the crust soft. But that’s okay. You can also keep your bread
in the fridge if you’re one of the weird people who does that. Your loaf will keep for
about 3 days (inside or outside of the fridge). I keep my bread in a linen bag inside a
bread box.

The only thing that might ruin your bread, and a suggestion for fixing
it

Leaving your bread out at room temperature for way too long
Somewhere along the line, there is a point of no return. My general suggestion is, if
you think you’ve over-proved your bread (i.e. you’ve left it on the counter for 12+
hours), give the bread a long cold proof. Leave it in the fridge for 12-24 hours so that
it can develop great flavour and then even if it comes out a bit flat, it will still have a
great taste and texture. I like to make overproved loaves into a focaccia with lots of
olive oil and flaky sea salt and that’s perfect because focaccia is supposed to be flat!
(Focaccia recipe in the second half of this book!)

40
41
Choosing and finding flour to bake with
Flour has been something that has confused me, and to be honest kind
of still does. But I think I have slowly started to understand! So here is
what I know about the choosing types of flour so far.

Baker’s flour and plain flour

A key difference between baker’s flour and plain flour is that baker’s flour usually has
a higher protein percentage (e.g. 11-15%), whereas plain flour might have more like
9-11%. The protein content in flour is what helps your bread to hold its shape while it
is developing. Protein is important when you’re making bread because you want the
bread to be able to rise and get nice and fluffy. The bread rises because of air being
released as part of the process of fermentation. If the flour you have used doesn’t have
a lot of protein in it, it won’t be able to expand to hold the air (i.e. you won’t be able to
have your nice open crumb), and you’ll end up with a flatter loaf.

A side note to this, that might help this all make a little more sense is that you use
different types of flour, with different protein amounts according to what you’re baking.
For example, when you bake pastries such as croissants, you use flour with a lower
protein content. You don’t want the croissants to have a chewy texture like you want
with bread. The higher protein in the flour means that it will also be chewier, which is
good for bread, but bad for a croissant.

The baker’s flour I use for my loaves has about 11% protein and that works really well
for me. You will also notice that most whole wheat flours contain more protein than
plain flour. If you want to make bread with really big holes in it (like you sometimes see
on Instagram) you need to use flour that has a very high protein content e.g. 13-15%.
This higher protein content will allow the dough to stretch more to accommodate bigger
holes. Personally, having super open crumb isn’t one of my priorities in bread baking.
I like having nicely proved bread and an even crumb. I like my bread to taste nice and
have a nice texture. You can have all those things without having to have giant
instagrammable bread holes. So unless you’re dying to get that Instagram photo of
your bread, don’t worry too much as long as your flour has at least 10% protein.

A random interesting fact if you are wanting to make a high hydration bread is (one
with massive holes and lots of water in the recipe e.g. above 80%) that some flours
have a W-value on their ingredient list. This number is reflective of how much water
the flour is able to absorb. The more water the flour can absorb, the better for high
hydration breads.

So you can definitely make a loaf using plain flour. If your plain flour has 9% protein,
it’s a great idea to add some wholemeal flour to the mix. This will help to make your
dough stronger.

42
Where to buy flour and getting flour in bulk
I would never want someone not to try out making their own sourdough because they
thought they needed to source a 12kg bag of locally milled flour before they could give
it a go. You can definitely make a great loaf of bread with a $1 bag of plain home brand
flour from Coles. I have personally tried it and you can. BUT if you are baking regularly,
especially if you are baking quite a lot of bread, it is such a great thing to do to support
other local people in the industry. And, your bread will taste different. I have been using
flour from @andrewbyerlee and my dough and the resulting bread has been so much
softer and has a beautiful delicate flavour. I think, start out with whatever flour you can
find, but once you’ve gotten addicted to baking, start looking into a local supplier for
your flour.

If you go to your local bulk food store, they are bound to have lots of different types of
flour there. You can talk to them about where they get their flour from. I suggest buying
about 500g of a bunch of different flours they have and try them all out in different
combinations. Find one or two that you really like and then talk to the people at the
bulk food store about getting a larger bag of that flour. They usually can do a 5kg or
even a 12kg bag of your chosen flour. If you are in Adelaide, some places that I’ve
bought large bags of flour from include: Whole+Some, House of Health, Siena Fine
Foods, Gaganis Bros and the Organic Market Café.

Supporting local millers

Here are some Insta handles of some millers that you might consider contacting to get
a hold of some of their fresh, locally milled flour (depending on your location). If you
are not located in Australia, or not in a part where I have listed a local miller, I would
suggest getting into contact with some of the micro bakeries in your area. Bakers are
always the loveliest people and they have a wealth of information about where to
source flour from and would most likely be more than happy to order an extra bag of
flour for you, or something similar. If you have more local millers for me to add to this
list, please let me know via email or on Instagram and I will add them in.

Some of them (e.g. Small World Bakery) even offer to give you some of their
sourdough starter when you buy their flour! The baking world is really an incredibly
mutually supportive community, so don’t be afraid to reach out locally to find a great
source of local flour. Aside from supporting local being an environmentally friendly
choice, it also makes a difference to the taste and texture of your bread.

@smallworldbakery (SA)
@andrewbyerlee (SA)
@malleeground (SA)
@fourleafmilling (SA)
@tuerongfarm (Vic)
@woodstockflour (Vic)
@wholegrain_milling (NSW)
43
Other types of flour (international)
European flours use numbers to differentiate types of flour. Inconveniently, different
countries in Europe use different numbers.

This is a little summary of what I understand about German and French flours so far.
I will update as I find out more! If you are reading this and know more, please write to
me so I can expand this section! (Thank you to @kroenchen_baecker for helping me
to understand this much!!)

For German flours, a smaller number means a lighter, finer flour.

So 405 flour is similar to the Australian plain flour – it’s the lightest German flour.
Wholemeal flour is equivalent to German 1800 flour.
French type 55 flour, Italian type 0 and German type 550 are equivalents.

A side note: wholemeal and wholewheat are different names for the same type of flour.
We say wholemeal in Australia, and wholewheat is a US term for the same type of
flour. Having said that, I think different grains, countries, and millers will always end
up having slightly different types / tastes / textures of flour.

44
Sourdough (wild yeast) vs. commercial yeast
Recently, I went down the rabbit hole if trying to actually understand
what sourdough is, i.e. what it is that you’re making when you make a
sourdough starter. And what I found surprised me. I realised some of the
assumptions I’d made about commercial yeast were not correct –
sourdough and the yeast that you can buy in a packet at the
supermarket are not necessarily as different as one might think.

What is yeast?
Whether we are talking about the yeast you can buy from the supermarket or the yeast
that is in your sourdough starter, both are alive. Both are what makes your bread rise.
Both are a form of fungus, a microorganism, which eats the flour in your bread dough
and causes it to ferment.

I feel like commercial yeast and sourdough are often put forward as opposites, as a
symbolic choice between the natural and the synthetic, between fast and slow, good
and bad, healthy and bad for you. While there is some truth to these assumptions, it
is most certainly an oversimplification. At some point I think I drew my own conclusions
(or maybe I read it somewhere deep in the bread forums of the internet) and came to
believe that sourdough was natural and baker’s yeast was a chemical alternative. This
is not correct.

Both commercial yeast and the sourdough in your little jar at home are living
organisms. This is also why you can’t keep commercial yeast forever. Eventually it
dies. The yeast powder you buy from the supermarket is akin to the flakes of dried
sourdough starter that you can make and at a later point bring back to life.

So what’s the difference then, between sourdough yeast and commercial yeast?
I was talking with my dad about this and for better or worse used the analogy of dogs
to explain the difference. Sourdough, if it were a dog, would be a mongrel.

Let me explain… The yeast in your sourdough starter is wild in the sense that it comes
from the ‘wild’ i.e. the immediate environment around you. Yeast can be found on your
skin, on fruit, and in flour. I’ve heard mixed opinions about whether or not the yeast is
actually in the air as well? In any case, yeast is around, and when you make a
sourdough starter you are essentially creating a home for the wild yeast that are
nearby to live. Your little jar is somewhere where they will be happy, comfortable, well
feed and able to multiply.

Because the yeast is coming directly from the surrounding environment it’s not all just
one type of yeast. It’s a combination of different types or I guess you could say breeds
or variants or stands of yeast. Thus, it is a mongrel, in that it is not one particular type
of yeast but a combination of yeast variants.
45
In contrast, if the yeast in your packet that you get from the supermarket were a dog it
would be, let’s say a Labrador, or some kind of fancy breed of dog that has been
selected for its particularly desirable qualities. It is a particular strand / type / breed of
yeast that has the qualities of making the bread rise quickly and predictably. So the
supermarket yeast has just this one kind of yeast that gives this one particular result.

Your sourdough wild yeast on the other hand has a combination of different types of
yeasts that all behave a little differently. This is why you hear so many bakers say that
they don’t have a recipe or that they don’t want to give you a recipe because it is
different for every baker and every kitchen. A different environment leads to different
forms of wild yeast being present in your starter (amongst other things) which mean
that your bread will develop differently according to what exactly is inside your starter.

This is not a bad thing. It’s one of the wonderful things about sourdough. But when
you start out baking there’s a little bit of guess work involved, lots of educated guesses
based on time and temperature to make. So with wild yeast, you might need to work
on your tolerance for ambiguity a little bit. Whereas with commercial yeast there is
much less ambiguity because the way it makes the bread rise is very predictable.

So, the dog analogy aside, commercial yeast is basically a form of yeast that has been
selected because it is optimal for producing bread and other yeasted goods quickly in
large quantities. Perhaps a more fitting analogy is that of the heirloom tomato. The
tomatoes that you find at the supermarket are most often red. They have been grown
this way, deliberately so that they will all be a similar size and colour, because that is
what is easiest to sell. But in nature, they actually come in many shapes and sizes and
are not always just red, or just the size and shape we are familiar with. Similarly,
commercial yeast is just one type of wild yeast that has been selected, isolated and
reproduced (grown) en masse because of its desirable qualities for baking.

So why do people keep saying sourdough is healthier? And why is it sour?

One reason that commercial yeast is so popular is because it is fast. However, the wild yeast
present in your sourdough starter tends to work more slowly and because of this, more
fermentation happens as part of the process. This is why people often say that sourdough is
healthier than bread made with commercial yeast. Sourdough is fully fermented, meaning that
the yeasts and other (good) bacteria in the sourdough starter have in effect pre-digested the
flour for you, making the work your digestive system has to do when you eat the bread a whole
lot easier. When fermentation is allowed to happen slowly, not only does the yeast act to pre-
digest part of the wheat, bacteria in the starter also contribute to this process. They create lactic
acid – you know how your starter sometimes smells like yoghurt? That’s why. The same thing
that enables you to keep yoghurt for longer than you can keep milk, and that gives it its distinct
smell and flavour is also present in your sourdough starter (as well as in many other fermented
products). Sometimes your starter might smell more like vinegar. That is also because of the
bacteria in your starter. These bacteria play an important role in pre-digesting your bread

46
dough, so that when you eat it there’s less work to do. If the process of fermentation only takes
a few hours, these bacteria never get a chance to do their work.
This is also why you might have noticed that if you leave your dough in the fridge overnight
before baking it has a stronger sour flavour than if you bake it directly after it’s fully proved at
room temperature. Putting the bread into the fridge stops the activity of the yeast, but the
process of the bacteria creating lactic acid continues – so the sour flavour develops but your
bread doesn’t overprove and become flat.
Aside from adding a nice flavour and making the bread easier to digest, the sourness of the
starter also helps to keep a nice balance of good bacteria in your jar. Your jar of sourdough
starter is actually quite an acidic environment, so the wild yeast can happily grow there and live
in harmony with the good bacteria that create the acids. The acidic environment helps to keep
away any unwanted bacteria and mould etc.
An interesting point made by a baker on the Fresh Loaf forum, that I thought was very
interesting, is that you can also make something akin to sourdough starter, but with commercial
yeast. So you make a preferment with a very small amount of commercial yeast and add a little
yoghurt or kefir – something that contains those lactic acid bacteria. You leave it for 24 hours
and following that use it in the same way as you would your sourdough starter to make a loaf.
In a way, maybe this is the best of both worlds because it gives you a very predictable starter
that also has the benefits of full fermentation. I haven’t tried it myself but I thought that the idea
was a curious one!

*A lot of what I have been learning about fermentation more broadly, and about sourdough
starter I have found in the book Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz – I highly recommend it
if you are interested in learning more. Also there is much information to be found on forums like
Quora, Reddit and the Fresh Loaf

47
Making the bread more or less sour
If you’ve just read the section above about yeast and sourdough, it might
have gotten you thinking about the sourness of the bread. Some people
really love the sour flavour. Other people aren’t the biggest fans. It’s very
personal – it is taste, after all. For me, love the sour flavour tastes
amazing, so I’ve spent some time thinking about how to make the bread
more sour, but I’ll tell you how to make it less sour too!

Making the bread more sour

Put simply, the more time your dough (and your starter) have before you bake them,
the more sour they will be.

If you use older starter, it will contain more acid, so there will be more acid in your
bread dough right from the beginning, leaving you with a more sour tasting loaf once
you bake it.

If your bread spends more time in the fridge, this is where a lot happens with the lactic
acid. So, the longer you leave the bread in the fridge, the more sour it will become.
Also, the more sour your bread is, the more digestible it is. You will notice also that the
texture of the bread changes the longer you leave it in the fridge. It becomes heavier
but also softer (after a few days, not hours). It will have a more complex flavour profile
and also stay fresh longer once it’s baked. Sometimes I leave my loaves in the fridge
for up to a week (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this book) and I like to call these
loaves long-ferment loaves rather than overproved.

In my opinion, a loaf is overproved if you forget about it on the bench for too long on a
hot day and the yeast runs out of food to eat, eventually eating so much of the flour
that it no longer can hold its structure and loses the air.

However, if you let the yeast do its work at room temperature and then put your loaf in
the fridge, where it is too cold for the yeast to be active, primarily the acid-creating
bacteria will be active. The effect that they have on the dough is different from that of
the yeast. You can leave them with the dough for a long time and still have a loaf that
has great sour flavour and the ability to hold air bubbles and rise at least somewhat.
The long ferment loaves don’t tend to get as much rise as those that are baked without
a very long cold proof.

A side note, I’ve wondered for a long time whether you could proof a loaf entirely in
the fridge, if you gave it a long time. The answer, I believe is no, because the yeast
would not have a chance to be active. Or you would end up with a kind of delicious
tasting flat bread, but it wouldn’t be the bread that you’re used to. Your dough needs
some time at room temperature so the yeast can do their thing.

48
Making the bread less sour
If you want your bread to be less sour, limit the time that your bread spends in the fridge. The
backwards bread method is a really great way to do this, because the bread spends almost
no time in the fridge at all. With this method you let your bread proof at room temperature
entirely, and then bake it straight away.
Also, if you feed your starter and then use it right at its peak, or just before, this will also help
your bread to be less sour because it has had less time to build up acid. If you use starter
straight from the fridge as I often suggest for the sake of convenience, you might notice that
your bread is more sour.
Summary: more time, particularly more time in the fridge = more sourness ☺
An additional note: when baking sweet things (see my recipe for sourdough croissants for
example) where we don’t really want the sourness at all, we often use a sweet starter – made
by adding sugar to the starter.

49
Sourdough
hacks
Shortcuts, steps you can skip, and things that make baking
easier

50
Starter hacks

1. Timing when you feed your starter to save time

You can make adjustments to the way you feed your starter and to the dough
ingredients so that bread baking doesn’t take over your life! You can adjust the
amounts you feed your starter to make things happen more quickly or slowly. Most
recipes emphasise how important it is to use starter at its peak. This is definitely true
but it’s more like around its peak, rather than the peak being one single, specific point
in time.

Basically, your starter is a little animal that eats whatever food (i.e. flour and water)
you give it. The more food you give it relative to its size, the longer it takes for it to eat
the food and reach its peak. The less food you give it, the more quickly it will eat the
food and reach its peak. So if you want to bake in 3-4 hours, keep more starter in the
jar and feed it less (e.g. 40g starter, 40g water and 40g flour). If you want to bake in
about 8 hours, keep less starter in the jar and feed it more (e.g. 5g starter, 50g water
and 50g flour). It doesn’t really matter how much old starter / seed you decide to use.
I was really worried about killing my starter by throwing away too much, but this won’t
happen. You can leave just the scrapings of the jar and put in more flour and water
and your starter will be fine.

Note that if the weather is really warm, everything will happen faster (maybe in 3-4
hours). If it’s really cold, it will happen more slowly (maybe in 8-10 hours). If it’s taking
too long, increase the amount of starter you give the fresh flour to - it will eat through
it more quickly. You might have to make some adjustments as the weather
changes.

2. Keeping the starter in the fridge all the time

This goes very much against the recommendations of probably the majority of bakers,
but it is totally fine to keep your starter in the fridge all the time and only take it out on
the day that you want to bake. Ideally, you feed it and let it rise before baking with it.

3. Not feeding the starter, using it straight out of the fridge

This one was pretty life changing when I worked out that you could do it! You can
actually use the starter directly out of the fridge, without feeding it at all. I have done
this with week old starter and had very good results. Just take your starter and use it
as per the recipe and your bread will still rise and will still have nice crumb! Your crumb
might not be quite as open as if you had used starter at its peak, but the difference is
minimal. I think the key to this working consistently is to always feed your starter after
using it, before putting it back in the fridge. That way, when you take it out of the fridge
it will have been slowly fermenting and it will be easy for it to become active again
without another feeding.

51
 4. What to do with starter discard*
Discard is the part of your starter that you decide not to feed. For example, if you have
30g of starter from yesterday and are making a single loaf today, you will only need to
feed 5g of that old starter (also referred to as mother, seed or discard.)

So what do you do with the other 25g? There are a lot of starter discard recipes around
(banana bread, pancakes, pizza bases) – you can use some of your discard in
basically any recipe that uses flour! Instead of throwing away the discard, keep it in a
Tupperware container in your fridge for at least a couple of weeks, adding to it each
time you feed the starter.

If, like me, you don’t often bake anything other than bread, you can actually use your
discard in your bread! When you are making your dough, measure your starter as
per usual (100g per loaf) and then pour in however much discard you’ve collected
since you baked last. Measure how much it is, divide it by two and subtract that amount
from the amount of water and flour you put into the dough.

For example, if I add 100g of fresh starter and then add 200g of old discard from my
fridge: 200g of discard is made up of 100g of water and 100g of flour.

To make one loaf I would then add:

• 370g – 100g = 270g water

• 400g white baker’s flour (baker’s flour stays the same)
• 120g – 100g = 20g rye flour

This is a nice way to feel like you’re not being wasteful with the discard but not feeling
obligated to bake random cakes. You might notice your bread proves a little quicker if
you put a lot of discard in, so you might need 4-5 hours instead of 6 hours total time
from when you’ve mixed the dough until when you put it in the fridge.

Note: if you want to do this, don’t use really old starter. If you’ve forgotten to feed
your starter for more than 24 hours if it’s out at room temperature (or even 12 hours if
it’s quite warm weather), it’s likely your starter will have become quite acidic and will
stop the gluten from developing properly in your bread. If your starter still has some
bubbles left in it and a bit of structure when you scoop it up with a spoon (rather than
just being mush!), it should be fine.

*If you decide to keep your starter in the fridge all the time and just use it when you
bake, you basically won’t ever have any discard (or you’ll have maybe 1tbsp if you
feed it once before baking – this is what I do now, and it’s really great because I don’t
have to feel guilty about throwing starter in the bin!)

52
Dough and baking hacks

1. Making dough and abandoning it instead of doing all the folds

You can actually mix together all the ingredients for your bread, leave them for about
30 minutes, perform step 2 of my recipe and then just abandon the dough completely
for about 6 hours (depending on the weather). When you return to the dough, give one
coil folds, let it rest for about 20 minutes and then shape it and put it in the fridge as
per the recipe. You might not get quite as much rise as you would if you’d done all the
folds but the bread will still be great! See also my Lazy Sourdough and Backwards
Bread recipes in the recipe section of this book, they incorporate this ‘technique’, or
lack thereof!

2. Timing how long your dough proves for

I like to write down what time it is when I mix my dough together, because sometimes
I forget. This way, you can work out about how many folds you should have done
(since you don’t have to do them all at exactly one hour since the last one) and about
what time you should be putting the dough into the fridge.

3. Taking and making the dough on the road, i.e. at work, at the pub, at a
friend’s house
Because dough making takes place over such a long time, it’s inevitable that at some
point you’ll want to either abandon your dough after mixing it together (which is actually
fine, as long as you’re home in time to put it in the fridge) or bring it with you. It’s
actually much easier to do than you might think. I have made many, many doughs at
work (I always bake them at home).

I usually mix all the ingredients together at home, put them into a smallish Tupperware
container and bring that with me to work, along with a wet tea towel. That and a small
bowl of water to clean your hands with is really all you need. Once you’ve got your
dough mixed together all you need to do is the (approximately) hourly stretch and
folds. You can wet your fingers in the little bowl of water before touching the dough
and use the wet tea towel to clean your hands afterwards. Once the dough has proved,
put it in the office fridge and bring it back home with you. If you have a longish trip
home and it’s summer, maybe put it in the fridge a little underproved because it will
continue proving on your way home. Then once you get home you can finish shaping
the dough, put it into the banneton and leave it in the fridge until you’re ready to bake
it. In my experience, not shaping the loaf straight away doesn’t make any difference
at all to the final loaf and it means you don’t have to be at home for six hours straight.

I really like making bread at work because the folds are for me like a kind of Pomodoro
timer that reminds me to take a break!

53
 4. Autolyse: handy if your starter isn’t ready in the morning but you want to
mix your ingredients together to take them to work
Sometimes I want to take the dough with me to work in the morning but my starter
hasn’t had time to rise yet. Autolyse lets you bypass this issue. You can feed your
starter in the morning before work and at the same time, mix the flour and water
together separately in a Tupperware container to create your dough to take to work.
Measure out the salt for your loaf but put it in some Gladwrap instead of directly into
the dough. And get a mini Tupperware container and measure out 100g of starter (that
I’ve just fed) into it. I take the starter in the Tupperware, and the salt and the dough in
a separate container with me to work. Then around 1pm when the starter has finally
started to rise, I add the starter and the salt to the dough mixture and begin the proving
process as per my usual basic recipe from there.

5. Making multiple doughs and baking them throughout the week

Time is definitely the number one barrier to people making their own bread. Sourdough
is a slow food, a slow and long process. You can actually use its slow pace to your
advantage, it doesn’t have to simply be a lot of waiting. Because the process is so
slow, it means that it’s also very flexible. Everything isn’t suddenly going to turn out
terribly because you’ve done something a little too early or a little too late. You can
manipulate the fermentation process so that it fits into your life.

One really great way to do this is to make multiple doughs at a time when you have a
bit more time, like on the weekend. Once they’re ready you can put them into the fridge
and bake as needed throughout the week. You can leave your dough in the fridge
for up to a week!

When you leave dough in the fridge for longer, the flavour will develop more and the
crumb will become softer. The bread will also become easier to digest as the bacteria
processes the gluten; it’s doing some of the digestive work for you. Some people who
are FODMAP-intolerant find that they are able to eat slow fermented sourdough bread,
but not other types of bread, for exactly this reason.

You can bake your bread once it has been in the fridge for 12 hours, or any time after
that up to one week. The ideal timeframe for maximum rise and softness is between
12 hours and 2 days. It is a matter of preference after that. Your loaves will be a little
denser and have more sour flavour the longer you leave them in the fridge. They will
also last longer, if they have been fermenting in the fridge for longer.

One note if you live in Europe: I think the fridges are kept at a higher temperature
there than they are in Australia. If your fridge is set above 6 degrees, you won’t be
able to leave your bread in the fridge for longer than overnight. This is because above
6 degrees, the fermentation process continues. Under six degrees it happens very,
very, very slowly, or not at all. So check your fridge temperature. If you are in Australia
or the US, you should be just fine. My fridge is around 4C.
54
You can also bake your bread on the same day that you’ve made the dough - just
leave it out at room temperature for an extra hour or so. I don’t recommend doing this
because the sourdough flavour will not be as developed and the bread won’t be as
easily digestible, but it will still taste okay.

6. Ways to control dough temperature without using the aircon/heater all the
time
You might notice that when the weather changes, your bread also changes. Your
bread will turn out the best if you can keep the dough between 22 and 26 C (although
I’ve made plenty of great loaves at 30+ degrees and at 16C as well). Generally, if you
don’t make any adaptations, your dough will be the same temperature as the air
temperature in your kitchen. If the dough is too cold (below 15 C) the fermentation
process occurs very slowly, meaning your bread will most likely be underproved. If it’s
too hot, the process will happen too quickly, meaning your bread can easily overprove.

Rather than buying an expensive proofing box or having the heater or air con on all
the time for your bread, a good way to control the temperature of your dough is to take
a second, larger mixing bowl and fill it with water that is the temperature you want
your dough to be (which is where the food thermometer can be so useful!). Then put
your other mixing bowl containing the dough inside the larger mixing bowl, so it floats
in the warmer or cooler water. This will keep your dough at the temperature you want
without the dough actually getting wet. You can change the water once an hour when
you do a fold, putting new water that’s the right temperature into the outside bowl. I’ve
found this to be most useful in winter when it gets really cold in the kitchen. You can
also use this method to make the proving process happen more quickly or slowly
depending on what you want.

Another trick is keeping the dough in the oven with just the light on, and /or with a cup
of warm water. This makes a warm humid environment for your dough and your oven
turns into a kind of proofing box. Make sure you don’t forget it’s in there though!

If I want to speed up my starter rising, I also sometimes fill up my kitchen sink with
some warmish water (about 37 degrees, so barely lukewarm to touch) and put the
starter jar into the pool of water. This brings up the temperature of the starter and
makes it rise more quickly. Make sure you don’t actually let any water into the starter
jar though.

7. Substituting and experimenting with flours

You can change and mix the ratios of flour in this recipe as much as you want. You
can bake with 80% rye / spelt / wholemeal and 20% baker’s flour, or 50% whole wheat
and 50% baker’s flour. It doesn’t matter, as long as the flours you use have 10g of
protein and as long as the total adds up to 520g per loaf (or 260g if you’re making two
smaller loaves). You can also increase or reduce the size of your loaves as long as
you keep the flour / water / starter / salt ratios the same. You can bake a giant or a
55
mini loaf! You might just need to adjust the baking time a little for larger or smaller
loaves.

8. Baking without a Dutch oven

If you don’t have a Dutch oven or would like to bake multiple loaves at the same time,
it is possible to bake without a Dutch oven. For best results, preheat the oven with a
baking stone inside. If possible, turn off the oven fan as this will help to keep the steam
inside the oven.

Place an oven proof tray (like a cake tin) at the bottom of the oven. When the oven is
hot, slide your loaf (or loaves) onto the baking stone on parchment paper, and pour
one cup of boiling water into the tin or tray at the bottom of the oven.

Spray your loaf (or loaves) and the inside of the oven with water from a spray bottle.
This helps to create steam, which is what is usually trapped so well inside the Dutch
oven. The steam helps to create a nice crust. However, be careful not to spray the
oven door with water as this can cause the glass to crack.

Once the bread is in and has been sprayed with water, and your water is poured into
the tray, shut the oven door. Don’t open it again until your bread has finished cooking
(i.e. skip the step where you would usually take the lid off of the Dutch oven). Keep an
eye on your loaf; it might cook a little quicker, so you might take it out a little earlier.

Note also, as mentioned earlier, that you will probably be able to fit two Dutch ovens
in your standard-sized oven if you put them on top of each other, rather than side by
side. I fit mine in by unscrewing the handle off the top of one of my Dutch ovens and
this created enough room to have one on a tray in the middle of the oven and one
directly on the bottom of the oven! It’s worth giving it a go and is much easier than
baking without the Dutch ovens.

9. Avoiding your dough sticking to the bowl / tea towel / banneton

If you are having this issue, I strongly suggest using more flour and getting some rice
flour because it’s so much less sticky than regular flour (because it has no gluten).
Spread flour over the outside of your dough, and on your tea towel or in your banneton
before you put the dough inside and into the fridge.

56
57
Sourdough
as art
Ideas and tips for scoring, how to make coloured bread

58
Scoring sourdough bread

Making your scores neat and smooth

Scoring bread is important because it allows your loaf to rise and gives the steam
coming out of the bread somewhere to escape. It can also be a lot of fun and make
your bread look very beautiful!

1. The key to good scoring is really simple - having a really sharp blade. The best
type is an old-fashioned razor blade. The sharper it is, the more easily you’ll be
able to cut through the dough without dragging. Make sure you cover up one
half of the razor blade somehow – with sticky tape, or you could make a slit in
an old cork from a wine bottle and put it in there. Just make sure you can use
the blade without cutting yourself! Or look at the UFO lame from Wire Monkey
Shop.
2. If you find your blade is dragging, try wetting it before scoring, or holding it at a
45 degree angle when scoring instead of holding it straight up.
3. To keep your blades sharp, don’t wash them under water, as the water dulls
the blade. I usually just wipe over the edges with my fingers, or you could use
a piece of paper towel.

Drawing creative designs into your loaf

If you want to draw intricate designs in your bread, follow these steps:

1. First cover the dough with rice flour. This helps to create contrast between
your design and the rest of the crust.
2. Next, create somewhere for the bread somewhere to rise that isn’t going to be
in the middle of your design. Sometimes I do one large slit on one side of the
bread, or I cut a circle around the outside edge of the bread. This means
the bread can open up and rise without destroying your design.
3. Once you’ve made a big cut somewhere, begin ‘drawing’ your more intricate
design with the blade. If you are feeling uncertain about your design, you can
practice drawing it on with a skewer and then trace over the lines with your
razor blade.
4. Keep your cuts even and shallow so that they don’t expand too much when the
bread is baking. Make your cuts quite gently, with about the same pressure as
you would when putting a pencil to paper. Keep your designs simple - they
will turn out better this way.

I find the round loaves (boules) the best to work with for scoring pictures into bread. If
I make an oval shaped loaf (a batard), I usually just do a single slice, slightly to one
side.

See the next page for some simple bread scoring design ideas.
59
Scoring design ideas

a simple face cross

` swirly star hashtag

cat single score for batard

60
jam on toast

61
Making coloured loaves

How to add colour to your loaves

Follow these steps in addition to the Easy Sourdough Recipe. These instructions give
you an overview of how to add natural colour to your bread! I have also included a
specific recipe for making a marbled Ube loaf in the Recipe Section of this book!

Vibrant purple loaves

I have found that the easiest way to add vibrant, natural colour to sourdough is Ube
Flavouring. Ube is a type of sweet potato, originally from the Philippines, which has a
very bright purple colour. It has a very mild, sweet flavour but you only add such a
small amount to the bread that it doesn’t actually affect the bread’s flavour at all. You
should be able find Ube Flavouring at your local Asian grocery store. Alternatively, it’s
also available online.

Simply add some Ube Flavouring to your ingredients when mixing your water and
starter together, before adding your flour and salt to the mix. You can add a squeeze
of lemon to help the colour hold during baking too. Then continue with the recipe as
per usual.

A more subtle blue-purple coloured loaf

For a more subtle blue-purple colour, you can use butterfly pea flower tea. Similar to
Ube Flavouring, it is virtually flavourless and won’t actually change the flavour of your
bread at all. To prepare the flowers:
1. Take a large handful of the flowers and put them into a jug.
2. Boil water in a kettle.
3. Pour water from the kettle into the jug with the flowers and measure the exact
amount of water needed for your loaf (i.e. 370g).
4. Add a squeeze of lemon.
5. Leave at room temperature overnight (or at least for a few hours).
6. When you are ready to bake, take a sieve and separate the flowers from the
water. Squeeze out the flowers and throw them away.
7. Substitute the usual water in the Easy Sourdough recipe for the butterfly pea
flower tea liquid, then follow the recipe as per usual.

Subtle pink loaf

To add a tinge of pink to your bread, add beetroot puree. Take half a fresh beetroot,
cut it up into small pieces and put it in the blender along with the juice of half a lemon.
Blend it until it becomes puree. Then mix it into your dough - after autolyse if you are
doing one, or after the first fold. The easiest way to mix it in is via lamination: stretch
out the dough into a rectangle, spread the beetroot over the rectangle and then fold it
back together. The beetroot will get more and more mixed in throughout the proving
process.
62
marbled ube sourdough: pretty on the inside

63
Marbled purple (Ube) sourdough bread
How to make a beautiful marbled sourdough loaf. I recommend Ube because of its
stunning, vibrant purple colour and but you could also substitute the water in this recipe
with butterfly pea flower tea, beetroot juice, or add turmeric powder to give vibrant
natural colour to your loaf.

Ingredients

For the coloured dough:

40g sourdough starter
150g water
Approx. 5 drops of Ube Flavouring
4g salt
50g wholegrain spelt flour
140g white baker’s flour

For the plain dough:

40g sourdough starter
150g water
4g salt
50g wholegrain spelt flour
140g white baker’s flour

Step 1: Mixing the coloured dough

Mix together your sourdough starter, water and Ube flavouring. The water should
become a deep purple colour. If you want it to be extra purple, add a few extra drops
of the Ube flavouring. Then add your salt and baker’s and wholegrain flour. Mix using
your hands until a shaggy dough has formed and all the flour is incorporate. Leave
covered with a wet tea towel for approximately 20 minutes.

Step 2: Mixing the plain dough

Mix together your sourdough starter and water until milky. Then add your flours and
salt. Mix until a shaggy dough forms and all the flour is incorporated. Leave covered
with a wet tea towel for approximately 20 minutes.

Step 3: Initial stretch and fold

Take the coloured dough. Begin with a stretch and fold, lifting up one edge of the
dough and folding it into itself and then turning the bowl and repeating about 4 or 5
times, until the dough starts to form a nice smooth ball. Repeat these steps for the
plain dough. Leave covered with a wet tea towel for approx. 30 minutes.

64
Step 4: Coil fold no.1
Take the coloured dough and complete a few coil folds (see instructions in the Easy
Sourdough recipe for how to do this). Then take the plain dough and complete a few
coil folds on that dough too. Leave covered with a wet tea towel for approx. 1 hour.

Step 5: Lamination – mixing the doughs together

Lightly dust a surface with rice flour. Take your coloured dough out of the bowl and
put it onto your benchtop. Gently stretch it out into a rectangle. It should stretch out to
about the size of an A4 piece of paper – although it doesn’t have to be too exact!
Then take your plain dough out of its bowl. Stretch it out on a separate space on your
bench top to a rectangle about the same size. Once you have your two separate
rectangles, take the plain rectangle and place it on top of the coloured one. Then fold
the rectangle up like a piece of paper, in half and in half again. Then put your dough
ball back into a bowl and leave it covered with a wet tea towel for about 1 hour.

Step 6: Coil fold no.2

Do a few coil folds, being nice and gentle with the dough. You don’t want the coloured
and plain doughs to get too mixed together, or you will lose some of that impressive
marbling effect. Cover with a wet tea towel and leave for about 1 hour.

Step 7: Shaping
Flour your benchtop lightly and tip the dough out of the bowl onto the bench. Do some
stretch and folds, pulling the corners of the dough ball into the centre and going
around, still being very gentle so that the dough doesn’t get too mixed together and
the colours stay separate.
Then flip the dough over so you’ve got the smooth side on top again. Use the dough
scraper and/or your hands to make the dough into a nice round ball, scraping
underneath and around the dough to do this. Coat the top of your dough ball with some
extra rice flour to stop it from sticking when you put it in the bowl in a minute!

Step 8: Into a bowl or a banneton

Also line your bowl with a tea towel or your banneton with some rice flour. Scoop up
your dough ball and plop it the bowl or banneton. Do some mini stretch and folds -
bring in the edges of the dough ball, lifting them up and folding them back into the
middle so the ball is nice and tight, still being gentle with the dough.
Now you can put the dough into the fridge. Leave it for at least 12 hours, or longer!

Now follow steps for baking the bread in the Easy Sourdough Recipe.

65
66
67
Sourdough
recipes
There is so much you can do once you know the basic
recipe!

68
Easy sourdough recipe
Let this one be your first loaf <3

Part 1: Preparing the dough (Approx. 4-7 hours)

Ingredients 1:
100g sourdough starter (at or near its peak)
370g room temperature filtered water
10g salt
400g white baker’s flour
120g spelt, rye or wholemeal flour (I find spelt the easiest to handle, so maybe try this
for your first loaf if you can find it!)

Step 1: Mixing starter, water, salt and flour

Mix the sourdough starter, water and salt together until milky. Then add the white
baker’s and rye / wholemeal / spelt flour and mix everything together. Make sure all
the flour is incorporated. It should form a shaggy dough. Leave the dough covered
with a wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 2: Stretch and folds2

Each time before you touch the dough, wet your hands so that it doesn’t stick.
When you touch the dough after an hour, you’ll notice it isn’t so shaggy anymore - it’s
become smoother. Pinch a corner of the dough, lift it up and fold it inwards. Turn the
bowl and do the same with another corner, repeating about 10 times so that the dough
starts to form a tighter ball. Then flip the dough ball over so that the seam side is down.
Fold the dough under itself, patting and smoothing the top to make it into more of a
smooth ball. Then leave covered with a wet tea towel. Wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 3: Coil folds no. 1

Now you are going to do the first of three rounds of coil folds, which are a really simple
and gentle folding technique. This involves picking up the dough from the middle and
letting either side of the dough ball fall down over your fingers, folding under itself.
Place it down and turn the bowl halfway around and repeat again on the other side
(See my diagrams on the next pages or search Google for a video of coil folds if you
are feeling confused!). Do this a total of four times. It will make your dough look like
more of a neat ball, with the edges folded underneath. Then once again, leave covered
with a wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1 hour.

1
These amounts either make one large (1kg) loaf or two smaller loaves. If you have two Dutch ovens and want
to make two, just keep following the steps until step 6 when you’ll split the dough ball in half.
2
See @jessica_prescott_ on IGTV for really helpful video on making sourdough, just in case you’re a visual
learner and want to see her do stretch and folds, and go through the full baking process.
69
Step 4: Coil folds no. 2 or lamination
Now you have a choice: you can either do your second round of coil folds, the same
as last time, or you can try lamination. Taking the optional step of lamination helps the
gluten structure develop and encourages nicely spaced large holes in the bread. To
laminate, slightly wet your bench top and take your dough out of the bowl. Stretch it out
into a square or rectangle as far as you can without breaking it. Then fold it in half, then in half
again, and back together again. Leave it covered with a wet tea towel and wait for
approximately 1 hour.

Step 5: Coil folds no.3

Do another, third and final round of coil folds. Hopefully you’ll be able to notice your
dough becoming a bit puffier and holding its shape a bit better. Leave it covered with
a wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 6: Shaping
If you want to make two smaller loaves, split your dough in half now - or leave it as
one larger loaf. To split the loaves, I wet my dough scraper and use it to cut through
the dough while it’s still in the mixing bowl. You could also wet a butter knife and use
that. Complete each step below for each separate dough ball.

Flour your benchtop lightly (with rice flour if you have it) and tip the dough out. Repeat
the stretch and folds that you did in step two, pulling the corners of the dough ball into
the centre until the dough feels tight. Then flip the dough over so you’ve got the smooth
side on top again. Use the dough scraper or your hands to make the dough into a nice
round ball, spinning it around and shaping it with your hands. If you find it is sticking
to your hands too much, put some (rice) flour on top while you’re doing this.

Step 7: Into the bowl or banneton and into the fridge

Once your dough is in a smooth ball, sprinkle some more flour on top (to stop it from
sticking to your bowl or tea towel) and get either a clean bowl or a banneton if you
have one. I often use the small-sized mixing bowl I’ve just used to make the bread in.
If using a bowl, line it with a clean tea towel and sprinkle some rice flour over the tea
towel. Then pick up the dough and place it seam side up, smooth side down into the
bowl.

Do one final round of stretch and folds. Pull in the corners of the dough in to make it
extra tight – this helps the bread to rise more. Then cover the banneton with cling
wrap, or if using a bowl, cover the bread with the outside edges of your tea towel.
Make sure none of the dough is exposed to the air.

Finally, put the dough into the fridge and leave it overnight for 12+ hours. (See the
section on ‘dough and baking shortcuts’ for more information on how long you should
wait before you can bake/how long you can leave the dough in the fridge).

70
Stretch and folds

lift one corner of the dough up and then fold it back in on itself, turn the bowl and repeat

Coil folds

let the dough fall to form a u-shape between your fingers,

then place it down and repeat

after the coil folds the dough will look like a little bum

71
Part 2: Baking the bread (Approx. 1.5 hours)
Step 1: Preheating the oven
Whenever you’re ready to bake the bread, turn the oven up as high as it will go, usually
somewhere around 250 degrees Celsius. Put your Dutch oven inside the oven as it’s
warming up so they can warm up together. You want to make sure everything is really
hot, so preheat the oven for at least 40 minutes.

Step 2: Getting the dough ready

Once the oven is hot, get your dough out of the fridge. Get a piece of parchment paper
and cut out a square a bit larger than your dough. Lift the dough out of the bowl with
your hands and place it onto the parchment paper.

Step 4: Scoring the dough

Sprinkle some more flour over the top of the dough and mix it in gently with your hands.
Get your razor / Stanley knife / knife and make a cut through the centre of the dough.
Do this quickly, holding the razor at a 45 degree angle. Try not to drag the dough.
Then make another cut in the other direction so that you have a cross shape - or of
course try another scoring design!

Step 5: Putting the dough into the Dutch oven

Get your Dutch oven out of the oven. Then place your dough inside carefully – the
Dutch oven is very hot! If you have a water spray bottle, give your Dutch oven and the
dough about 4-6 sprays of water.

Step 6: Bake for 10 minutes at max temperature

Put the lid on and put the Dutch oven(s) with your dough(s) inside into the oven and
bake for 10 minutes.

Step 7: Bake for 30 minutes at 225 degrees

Turn the oven down to 225 degrees and bake for a further 30 minutes.

Step 8: Bake for 10-15 minutes without lid

Take off the lid of the Dutch oven and bake for a further 10-15 minutes, until the crust
is golden brown.

Step 9: Cooling
Take the Dutch oven out of the oven and remove the bread from the Dutch oven. Place
the bread onto a cooling rack and wait for 1 hour. Let it cool fully (this is important!)

Step 10: Enjoying the bread

Once the bread has cooled fully, enjoy the amazing loaf that you’ve made!!

72
73
Backwards bread
When you have no time, have run out of bread and just want bread the next morning:
this is the recipe for you. You mix everything together the night before, abandon the
bread and it’s ready for you to bake in the morning! A totally life changing, no stress
method of making bread!
*Make sure you read the recipe notes that follow the recipe as you may need to
adjust in warmer weather

The ingredients list below is for a medium sized loaf. You can use the ingredients list
from the Easy Sourdough Recipe too, if you want to make a larger loaf.

If you have been keeping your starter in the fridge, and you put it in there at its peak,
you can use it directly from the fridge, meaning that you really can spontaneously
decide to make a loaf at 10pm at night and have beautiful fresh bread ready to eat the
next morning.

Ingredients:
80g sourdough starter
285g water
8g salt
300g baker’s flour
80g spelt, rye or wholemeal flour

Step 1: Mixing starter, water, salt

Because there are so few steps and so little mixing / folding in this recipe, you need to
make sure your salt gets mixed in really well. Measure out your starter, water and salt
and give them a really good mix. Make sure that all the salt has dissolved into the
water.

Step 2: Adding the flour

Add the flour and mix well until there is no visible dry flour. You should have a shaggy
looking dough. Then leave covered with a wet tea towel for approximately 20 minutes.
Longer is fine, but 20 is really the minimum you need to leave it for before going to the
next step.

Step 3: Stretch and folds

Now you are going to do your first and only set of stretch and folds. The dough should
have changed its consistency since you first mixed it together, becoming smoother.
Lift up one corner of the dough and pull it into itself. Then turn the bowl and repeat
about 7-10 times, until your dough has formed a nice smooth ball. You can take the
dough out of the bowl and do a few coil folds at this stage too. You just want to make
sure that everything is all mixed in well at this point because you’re about to abandon
your dough for the night (or day, if you’re going to work!).

74
Now leave the dough covered with a wet tea towel for about 10 hours. Go to bed or
go to work and just leave the dough on the kitchen bench at room temperature.

Step 4: Shaping
After about 10 hours, you will see that your dough has gotten much bigger since you
last looked at it. That’s good! Take it out of the mixing bowl and place it onto a lightly
floured benchtop.

Shape it into a nice round ball, pulling the edges into the middle of the dough, similar
to what you did with the stretch and folds. Flip over the ball so that the seam side is
facing down and use your hands and/or a dough scraper to make the dough ball nice
and smooth on the edges, turning it around as you go with your hands.

Once you’ve got a nicely shaped ball, get a banneton or a bowl and a tea towel. Give
the top of the dough ball a coating of flour and place it into your banneton or bowl, with
the smooth side facing down and seam side up. Pull the edges of the dough into the
centre to create an even tighter ball.

Now cover it with a wet tea towel or cling wrap and put the dough into the fridge.

Step 5: Preheating the oven

Once your dough is in the fridge (it’s going in there because cool dough is much easier
to score), preheat your oven to its maximum temperature for about 45 minutes with
your Dutch oven inside.

Step 6: Scoring and baking

Get your dough out of the fridge. Cut a piece of baking paper to just larger than the
size of your dough ball, then take the dough out of the banneton and put it onto the
baking paper. Use a sharp knife or a bread lame to score the dough.

Give the dough a few sprays of water. Get your Dutch oven out of the oven and plop
the bread inside. Give it another spray with water and put the lid on.

Bake the bread at full temperature for 10 minutes. Then bake for a further 25 minutes
at 225 degrees. Then take the lid off and bake for a further 15-20 minutes – or until
your loaf has a lovely golden brown colour.

Then take it out of the oven and enjoy it once you’ve let it cool down (at least a little!).

75
Notes on the backwards bread method

Why not always just use this method?

This is a question I ask myself! Really there is no reason why you shouldn’t, especially
if it means you are able to bake more bread, versus really struggling to fit it in any
other way. The main reason to use methods with more steps (such as the Easy
Sourdough Recipe) is that they give you more control over the fermentation process
– you can see when the dough looks ready and choose when to stop it. With the
backwards bread, you are asleep so you can’t check and see how the bread is going.

Another thing is that without folds, you build less dough strength. So the dough using
this method can be a little tricker to handle. I always use wet hands and rice flour to
help. You might also notice when you bake the loaf that it has more cracks in the crust
– doing more folds helps the dough to become more elastic, when leaving them out
I’ve noticed sometimes there are more cracks in my loaves, but personally I like the
rustic look.

The crumb can also be less even using the backwards bread method – meaning you
might have some quite large holes in your bread. This is because another reason for
the folds is to develop gluten and create even spacing of the air bubbles. Having said
that, the crumb on my backwards bread loaves has almost always been really lovely
and well-spaced out! Sometimes better than with my regular loaves. I don’t really have
an explanation for this, but I’m happy about it!

Does the backwards bread taste different?

Because the bread doesn’t spend much time in the fridge, it doesn’t develop as much
sour flavour. But, it still tastes really great and is much, much nicer than any bread you
might buy from the supermarket! Also, if you want you can put it in the fridge for a
while (e.g. 24 hours or maybe even longer) instead of baking it the next morning.
It will develop more sour flavour this way. (Make sure your fridge is set around 4C)

Adaptations according to the weather

This method works very nicely in Australian winter, when the kitchen is about 15-19 C
overnight. This relatively cool temperature means that fermentation happens quite
slowly and the bread does not overprove. If it’s super cold in your kitchen (e.g. 10C),
try to find somewhere warmer to keep the dough, otherwise not enough fermentation
will happen even if you leave it for a long time.

Being left out so long in summer, however, the bread is more likely to overprove.
To stop this from happening, you can adjust the amount of starter that you add to the
recipe - for example, using only 40g (or even 20g) instead of 80g. This will make the
fermentation process happen more slowly. You can also reduce the proofing time from
10 hours to 6-8 hours. The higher the humidity the more quickly the bread will prove.

76
Minimalist loaf
This recipe is similar to the backwards bread, but you can make it during the day rather
than overnight and still include a cold proof i.e. putting it into the fridge for a longer
period of time. This gives you a bit more flexibility related to when you decide to bake
it and also gives the bread more time to develop a lovely sour flavour.

Ingredients:
100g sourdough starter*
*Your starter can be used straight out of the fridge, without feeding! It will still
be able to make your bread rise even if it hasn’t been fed for up to a week. See
my notes on keeping your starter in the fridge at the start of this book.
370g room temperature water
10g salt
420g white baker’s flour
100g wholemeal flour (or just use all white baker’s flour if you don’t have wholemeal)

Step 1: Mixing starter, water, salt and flour

First, mix together the starter and water until milky. Then add the flour and salt. Mix
together using your hands. Leave covered with a wet tea towel for 20 minutes.

Step 2: Initial folds

Do a few stretch and folds to bring the dough together and make sure that all your
ingredients are really properly mixed in. Keep puling the dough up and folding it into
itself (see instructions in the Easy Sourdough recipe) until it starts to form a nice
smooth ball. Leave covered with a wet tea towel.

Step 3: Letting the bread prove (develop and rise) at room temperature
Leave your dough covered, out on the counter at room temperature for about 4-5 hours
(or maybe a little longer if it’s below 20 degrees in your kitchen). At this stage it’s up
to you what you do with the loaf. Actually, if you just leave it from this point onwards,
it will be fine! If you have time, you could do a fold or two throughout the process, but
you don’t have to. You can go out now and do whatever things you need to do during
your day and just abandon the bread.

Step 4: Shaping
Do some more stretch and folds to make your dough come back into a nice ball. Then
take it out of the bowl. Use a dough scraper or your hands to shape the dough into a
ball. Coat the top of the dough with rice flour. Get a banneton or a bowl lined with a
tea towel, sprinkle it with a little rice flour and put your dough inside the bowl. Do a few
final stretch and folds, pulling in the edges of the dough to make it a really nice tight
ball, and then cover with plastic or the tea towel and put into the fridge. Leave it in the
fridge for at least 12 hours, or longer if you like.
Now follow the steps for ‘Baking the Bread’ (part 2) in the Easy Sourdough
recipe.
77
Fruit sourdough bread
A recipe for fruit bread with lots of fruit. This is one of my favourite forms of toast!!

Ingredients:
100g sourdough starter
370g room temperature filtered water
10g salt
400g white baker’s flour
120g rye flour
200g sultanas and/or currants (ideally soaked in water overnight, or for at least 30
minutes in boiling water before using – this helps to stop them from burning during
baking)
2 tsp. cinnamon (or more to taste)
1 tbsp. marmalade

Step 1: Mixing starter, water, salt and flour

Mix the sourdough starter, water and salt together until milky. Then add the white
baker’s and rye flour and mix everything together. Make sure all the flour is
incorporated. It should form a shaggy dough. Leave covered with a wet tea towel and
wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 2: Adding fruit bread ingredients and initial folds

Add the sultanas, marmalade and cinnamon to the centre of the dough and begin
pinching the corners of the dough, lifting it up and folding it inwards (stretch and folds).
The ingredients will become better and better incorporated as you continue the folds.

Turn the bowl and do the same with another corner, repeating about 10 times so that
the dough starts to form a tighter ball. Then flip the dough ball over so that the seam
side is down. Fold the dough under itself, patting and smoothing the top to make it into
more of a smooth ball. Then leave covered with a wet tea towel and wait for
approximately 1 hour.

Step 3: Coil folds no.1

Complete the first of 3 rounds of coil folds (See ‘Easy Sourdough recipe’ for details).
Then once again, leave covered with a wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1
hour.

Step 4: Coil folds no.2

Do your second round of coil folds just the same as last time. Leave covered with a
wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 5: Coil folds no.3

Do another, third and final round of coil folds. Your fruit mix should be reasonably well
incorporated. Leave covered with a wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1 hour.
78
Step 6: Shaping
Flour your benchtop lightly and tip the dough out. Repeat your stretch and folds as in
step 2, pulling the corners of the dough ball into the centre and going around.

Then flip the dough over so you’ve got the smooth side on top again. Use the dough
scraper or your hands to make the dough into a nice round ball, scraping underneath
and around the dough to do this.

Step 7: Into the bowl or banneton and into the fridge

Once your dough is in a smooth ball, sprinkle some flour on top and get either a clean
bowl or a banneton if you have one.

Line the bowl with a clean tea towel and sprinkle some flour over it. Then pick up the
dough and place it seam side up, smooth side down into the bowl.

Pull in the corners of the dough again to make it extra tight – this helps the bread to
rise more. Cover with cling wrap.

Then put it into the fridge and leave it overnight (or longer or shorter).

Now follow the steps for ‘Baking the Bread’ (part 2) in the Easy Sourdough
recipe.

Serve toasted with lots of delicious lightly salted butter!

79
Olive loaf
A simple way to make your bread more exciting: by adding olives and creating a
beautiful savoury loaf

Ingredients:
100g sourdough starter
370g room temperature filtered water
10g salt
400g white baker’s flour
120g spelt, rye or wholemeal flour
180g pitted Kalamata or Sicilian olives chopped (or more if you like lots of olives)

Step 1: Mixing starter, water, salt and flour

Mix the sourdough starter, water and salt together until milky. Then add the white
baker’s and spelt flour and mix everything together. Make sure all the flour is
incorporated. It should form a shaggy dough. Leave covered with a wet tea towel.
Wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 2: Adding the olives and stretch and folds

Add chopped, pitted olives to your dough mixture, dropping them onto the centre of
the dough.

Begin your stretch and folds by pinching a corner of the dough, lifting it up and folding
it inwards. The olives won’t be perfectly mixed in but just go ahead as usual – they will
get more and more mixed through each time you fold the bread. Turn the bowl and do
the same with another corner, repeating about 10 times so that the dough starts to
form a tighter ball. Then flip the dough ball over so that the seam side is down. Fold
the dough under itself, patting and smoothing the top to make it into more of a smooth
ball. Then leave covered with a wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 3: Coil folds no.1

Complete the first of 3 rounds of coil folds (See ‘Easy Sourdough recipe’ for details).
Then once again, leave covered with a wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1
hour.

Step 4: Coil folds no.2

Do your second round of coil folds just the same as last time. Leave covered with a
wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 5: Coil folds no.3

Do another, third and final round of coil folds. Your olives should be well incorporated.
Do some extra folds if they are not. Leave covered with a wet tea towel and wait for
approximately 1 hour.
80
Step 6: Shaping
Flour your benchtop lightly and tip the dough out. Repeat your stretch and folds as in
step 2, pulling the corners of the dough ball into the centre and going around. Then
flip the dough over so you’ve got the smooth side on top again. Use the dough scraper
or your hands to make the dough into a nice round ball, scraping underneath and
around the dough to do this.

Step 7: Into the bowl or banneton and into the fridge

Once your dough is in a smooth ball, sprinkle some flour on top and get either a clean
bowl or a banneton if you have one.

Line the bowl with a clean tea towel and sprinkle some flour over it. Then pick up the
dough and place it seam side up, smooth side down into the bowl.

Pull in the corners of the dough again to make it extra tight – this helps the bread to
rise more. Cover with cling wrap.

Then put it into the fridge and leave it overnight (or longer or shorter).

Now follow the steps for ‘Baking the Bread’ (part 2) in the Easy Sourdough
recipe.

81
beautiful patterns come from not scoring dark rye bread at all
and letting it crack open naturally while it bakes

82
Schwarzbrot mit Buttermilch (‘black’ rye bread with buttermilk)
A recipe for rich, dark, German-style bread. This loaf is lovely and moist. It also stays
fresh for longer than your regular baker’s flour loaves.

Ingredients:
150g sourdough starter (ideally made with rye or wholemeal flour)
300g buttermilk (or substitute for water if you want to make a vegan version)
50g water
10g molasses (alternatively: golden syrup)
10g salt
375g dark rye flour

Step 1: Mixing the molasses and buttermilk

If you’ve been able to find molasses, mix them together with the buttermilk. You can
use golden syrup instead of molasses for a similar effect. Ideally let the buttermilk
come to room temperature before moving onto step 2 (if you’re really impatient and
just use it, it will be ok). If you want to make a vegan version of this recipe you can just
use water instead of buttermilk. The flavour will be slightly different but it will still be a
lovely heavy, moist bread.

Step 2: Mixing starter, water, salt and flour

Mix the sourdough starter, buttermilk-molasses mixture, water and salt together until
milky. Then add the rye flour and mix everything together. Make sure all the flour is
incorporated. It might seem a little thicker and sticker than usual - don’t worry. It should
still form a shaggy dough. Leave covered with a wet tea towel and wait for
approximately 20 minutes

Step 3: Smoothing the dough

After about 20 minutes, mix the dough again gently with your hands to make sure that
everything is really well incorporated. Smooth it over into a nice round ball and leave
it covered with a tea towel.

Now you can leave the dough to prove for approximately 4 hours. You don’t need to
do any folds, as the gluten in rye develops differently and folds have no effect.

Step 4: Shaping the dough

After 4-6 hours, once the dough has visibly increased in size, and when you poke it
lightly the impression of your finger stays in the dough, you can begin to shape it.
Lightly flour a surface with rice flour and take the dough out of the bowl. Rye is
surprisingly easy to shape. Make it into a nice round smooth dome.

Usually, with non-rye loaves, the seam side where you have pulled the dough into the
centre always becomes the bottom of the loaf. However, a nice trick with rye loaves to
83
make sure that you get the lovely ‘rustikal’ (aka rustic-patterned) crust, is to make the
seam side the top of the loaf. So when you shape your loaf into a cute circle, make
the top of the dome the seam side. Once you are happy with the shape, give it a good
coating of rice flour and place with the seam side down into a banneton or a round
bowl lined with a tea towel. Later, when you take it out of the banneton, the seam side
is going to be on top.

Leave it in the fridge for approximately12 hours. You can actually bake this loaf straight
away, but as with my other loaves, I like the way the flavour develops when the dough
gets some extra time in the fridge.

Now follow steps for baking the bread in the Easy Sourdough Recipe, with the
following exception:

As mentioned above, you don’t need to score rye loaves. Coat the top of the loaf with
some extra rice flour and then put the loaf straight into the oven without scoring. The
loaf will rise and crack naturally, creating a beautiful contrastive cracked pattern.

84
Plain buttermilk sourdough with sunflower seeds
Adding buttermilk to sourdough gives it a lovely soft texture and added complexity in
flavour. This is a great option if you want to branch out but aren’t so keen on the
traditional German dark rye variants that traditionally use buttermilk. This is a very light
and approachable loaf that everyone will enjoy. The dough will also be easier to
handle, thanks to the buttermilk.

Ingredients:
80g sourdough starter
200g buttermilk (ideally at room temperature)
100g water
100g rye, spelt or wholemeal flour
280g baker’s flour
8g salt
80g sunflower seeds

Step 1: Mixing starter, buttermilk, salt and flour

First, mix together the starter, buttermilk and water. Then add the flour and salt. Mix
together until you can’t see any flour. It should have a shaggy consistency. Leave
covered with a wet tea towel for 20-30 minutes.

Step 2: Stretch and folds

After 20-30 minutes the dough should have changed consistency and come together
a little. Pull the dough upwards and fold it into itself, repeating this as you turn the bowl
around, until the mixture starts to become smoother. You will probably notice working
with the buttermilk dough that it is a bit firmer than regular dough. Don’t worry, this is
normal and the dough is going to come out great! Leave covered with a wet tea towel
for 30 minutes to 1 hour.

Step 3: Slap and folds

These are fun, but if you can’t be bothered taking the bread out of its bowl you can
just do a stretch and fold here.

To do a slap and fold, wet your hands and then wet the benchtop very lightly. Take
your dough out of the bowl and slap it down onto the bench top. Fold the top part of
the dough into the bottom half of the dough. Then pick it up again and repeat. You can
keep repeating this for a few minutes – the dough should start to become smoother
and stronger. This folding technique helps develop gluten and makes sure all the
ingredients are well-incorporated. You don’t have to be gentle, you can really slap it
down quite hard on the bench. Then leave it covered with a wet tea towel for about 1
hour.

85
Step 4: Coil folds
Lift your dough up out of the bowl using both hands and let it fall down into itself (see
the diagrams with the Easy Sourdough Recipe if that part isn’t making sense!) Turn
the bowl around and repeat. The dough should come together into a nice smooth ball.
Then leave covered with a wet tea towel for about 1 hour.

Step 5: Coil folds, again

Complete another set of coil folds, then leave covered with a wet tea towel for about
1 hour.

Step 6: Shaping
After your dough has been out on the bench for a total of 4-6 hours since mixing,
depending on the weather (warmer weather closer to 4 hours, cooler weather closer
to 6 or maybe a little longer), it will be ready to shape. Wet your hands and lightly flour
your bench with rice flour. Take your dough out of the bowl and put it on the bench.
Use the stretch and fold technique to pull the edges of the dough into the centre until
you have formed a nice ball. Then flip the dough over and use your hands to reinforce
the ball shape, turning the dough around and around.

Step 7: Adding seeds

Get a plate and spread the sunflower seeds onto the plate. Take your dough ball and
give it a spray of water. Then roll the dough ball in the plate of sunflower seeds, so
that the top of your loaf is evenly covered with the seeds.

Step 8: Into the banneton and into the fridge

Give your dough a little bit of rice flour and then place it inside a banneton or a bowl
lined with a tea towel. Cover the dough with your tea towel or with glad wrap and put
it into the fridge. Leave the dough in the fridge overnight (for approximately 12 hours,
or longer!)

When you are ready to bake, follow the steps for baking the bread in the Easy
Sourdough recipe.

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100% Spelt sourdough bread
Spelt is an ancient grain. It is good for you. The dough tends to be very extensible so
it’s fun to make but also a bit more difficult to handle.

Ingredients:
100g sourdough starter (ideally made with spelt flour, but wholemeal is also ok)
300g water
Juice of half a lemon
10g salt
550g spelt flour

Step 1: Mixing starter, water, salt and flour

Mix the sourdough starter, water, lemon juice and salt together until milky. The lemon
juice helps to build structure with the spelt flour and make the dough easier to handle.
Next, add the spelt flour and mix everything together. Make sure all the flour is
incorporated. It should form a shaggy dough. Leave covered with a wet tea towel and
wait for approximately 20 minutes.

Step 2: Stretch and folds

Begin your stretch and folds by pinching a corner of the dough, lifting it up and folding
it inwards. You will probably notice now that the dough is really stretchy! Turn the bowl
and do the same with another corner, repeating about 10 times so that the dough
starts to form a tighter ball. Then flip the dough ball over so that the seam side is down.
Fold the dough under itself, patting and smoothing the top to make it into more of a
smooth ball. Then leave it covered with a wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1
hour.

Step 3: Coil folds no.1

Complete the first of 3 rounds of coil folds (See ‘Easy Sourdough recipe’ for details).
Then once again, leave covered with a wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1
hour.

Step 4: Coil folds no.2

Do your second round of coil folds just the same as last time. Leave it covered with a
wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 5: Coil folds no.3

Do another, third and final round of coil folds. Leave covered with a wet tea towel and
wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 6: Shaping
Shaping can be a bit trickier with spelt because it’s so stretchy. Flour your benchtop
lightly and tip the dough out. Do a couple of gentle coil folds so that the dough comes
together.
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Take it out of the bowl. Use the dough scraper or your hands to make the dough into
a nice round ball, scraping underneath and around the dough to do this. Keep coating
the dough with flour and get it into as tight of a ball as possible (it probably won’t be
that tight, but that’s ok).

Step 7: Into the bowl or banneton and into the fridge

Once your dough is in a smooth ball, sprinkle some flour on top and get either a clean
bowl or a banneton if you have one.

Line the bowl with a clean tea towel and sprinkle some flour over it. Then pick up the
dough and place it seam side up, smooth side down into the bowl.

Pull in the corners of the dough again to make it extra tight. This part is particularly
important with the spelt, because it keeps spreading out! Cover with cling wrap, then
put it into the fridge and leave it overnight or for a couple of days.

Now follow the steps for ‘Baking the Bread’ (part 2) in the Easy Sourdough
recipe.

*If you really didn’t enjoy working with the spelt dough because you found it too hard
to handle, a great alternative is to do the same recipe with 50% spelt, 50% wholemeal.
This makes the dough a lot easier to work with and you still get a really nicely flavoured
loaf.

88
Sourdough hot cross buns (with vegan option)
I love hot cross buns so much. I only realised this when I moved to Germany and they
didn’t have any. Making hot cross buns at Easter in Germany was actually the very
first time I ever baked anything with yeast – and I was terrified! And when they finally
turned out I was so delicious.

These are different from your typical store bought hot cross buns (which are almost
always made with commercial yeast and are basically little cakes with a lot of sugar
and eggs etc.). They are flavourful and hearty and even my parents who generally are
avid fans of the Coles HCBs agreed that they really enjoyed my sourdough version.

You can also leave out the crosses and make these as simple, delicious fruit buns any
time of the year!

Ingredients
Makes 1 tray of buns (approx. 9-10 buns)

Dough
80g starter
400g white flour
8g salt
40g sugar
260g milk (or oat milk or other vegan mylk, plus some to brush with, ideally at room
temperature)
45g butter (or 65g margarine (I use Nuttelex) at room temperature)

Bun filling
5g cinnamon
1⁄2 tsp nutmeg
150g sultana and raisin mix (soaked in hot water for at least 30 minutes, ideally
overnight)
40g orange marmalade

Crosses
60g flour
5g olive oil
50g water

Glaze
20g brown sugar
20g hot water

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Step 1: Mixing the dough
Mix together the sourdough starter, salt, sugar, butter (or margarine) and milk (or
mylk). Then add the flour and mix to form a shaggy dough. Leave for 10 minutes and
then return to the dough and do a few stretch and folds to help the dough come
together into a smoother ball and to make sure everything is well combined – although
it’s no problem if there a few butter chunks left. Then leave covered with a wet tea
towel for 1-3 hours.

Step 2: Adding the filling

Take your sultanas and raisins that have hopefully been soaking overnight and drain
them. Then mix the marmalade, nutmeg and cinnamon together with the sultanas.

After your dough has been resting for 1-3 hours (it doesn’t matter at what specific point
you choose to do this step within this timeframe) you’re going to laminate your dough,
meaning you’re going to stretch it out into a big rectangle. Very lightly wet your
workbench using wet hands, so that your dough won’t stick. Then stretch out the dough
onto the bench into a rectangle as wide as it can go without tearing.

Tip the sultana mix over the dough rectangle and spread it out evenly.

Then roll up the dough, longways first and then again in the other direction so that it
becomes a round ball of dough again and place it back in its bowl, covered with a wet
tea towel.

Step 3: Dough development

Allow the dough to proof. During this time, it’s helpful to do a coil folds every hour or
so to make sure that the sultanas are well incorporated. You can squish the dough
somewhat with your hands too to help with this too.

The total development time for the dough from the time when you mix it until when you
bake it or put it into the fridge will be somewhere between 5 and 10 hours. Because
it’s an ‘enriched’ dough, meaning it has milk and butter in it, it proves more slowly than
other doughs. So add a few extra hours onto however long you’d usually leave a loaf
of bread on that particular day. For example, I made these when it was about 28
degrees and gave them 5 hours total proofing time. If it was cooler e.g. 18 degrees in
my kitchen I’d leave them for 10 hours – probably overnight on the counter while I
slept. The dough should look puffier and bubblier. Once the dough has developed at
room temperature you can leave it in the fridge until you’re ready to bake it (even for
a day or so). The dough will be easier to shape if it’s had some time to chill in the
fridge, but you can also skip that step if you’re short on time.

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Step 4: Shaping
Take your dough and divide it into blobs weighing between 105-115g. Then shape the
blobs into little balls. You can use the palm of your hand to roll them, or you can shape
them just like you would with a round loaf, bringing the edges in towards the centre.

Very important: Make sure you choose a smooth part of the dough to be the outside
of the bun. Choose a part that doesn’t have any sultanas or raisins and if there are
any, pull them out and squish them into the bottom of the bun. If you have fruit on the
outside edge of your bun it can burn and also causes the bun not to look as neat.

Place the buns into a baking tray lined with baking paper. Brush the buns with milk (or
mylk).

Preheat the oven to 220C.

Step 5: Crosses
In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, olive oil and water to create the cross
mixture. Use a piping bag (or a zip lock bag with a hole cut into the corner) to pipe
crosses onto the buns.

Step 6: Baking
Give the buns a few sprays of water (to help create steam while they bake).

Bake at 220C for 25 minutes with the fan turned off. If you can’t turn the fan off in your
oven, cover your oven tray with another deep oven tray so that it acts like a lid to trap
steam and stop your buns from getting too brown before they’ve cooked through.

Then remove the tray-lid or turn on the oven fan and bake for a further 10-25 minutes.
Keep a close eye on them to make sure that they don’t get too dark. Once they’re
golden brown, take them out.

While the buns are baking, when you think they’re almost done, you can prepare the
glaze by mixing the hot water and brown sugar together in a cup.

Step 7: Glazing and enjoying

As soon as you take the buns out of the oven, paint them with the glaze while they’re
still hot. Make sure to give them a really nice coating on all edges so that they come
out looking pretty and shiny. Let them cool as long as you can hold yourself back for
and then enjoy with lots of butter (or margarine!).

91
92
Seeded wholemeal sourdough bread
A simple loaf with yummy seeds inside and out.

Ingredients:
100g sourdough starter
370g room temperature filtered water
10g salt
200g white baker’s flour
320g wholemeal flour
15g Sunflower seeds
15g Flax seeds
15g Pumpkin seeds
plus some extra of each of the seeds for topping the dough

Step 1: Mixing starter, water, salt and flour

Mix the sourdough starter, water and salt together until milky. Then add the wholemeal
and baker’s flour and mix everything together. Make sure all the flour is incorporated.
It should form a shaggy dough. Leave covered with a wet tea towel and wait for
approximately 1 hour.

Step 2: Adding seeds and stretch and folds

Add the sunflower seeds, flax and pumpkin seeds to the centre of the dough. Then
begin by pinching a corner of the dough, lifting it up and folding it inwards. Turn the
bowl to do the same with another corner, repeating about 10 times so that the dough
starts to form a tighter ball. Flip the dough ball over so that the seam side is down.
Fold the dough under itself, patting and smoothing the top to make it into more of a
smooth ball. It’s okay if the seeds don’t get incorporated completely straight away, as
you’ll continue folding them in with your coil folds in the next steps. Leave the dough
covered with a wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 3: Coil folds no.1

Complete the first of three rounds of coil folds. Then leave covered with a wet tea towel
and wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 4: Coil folds no.2

Do your second round of coil folds, just the same as last time. Leave covered with a
wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 5: Coil folds no.3

Do your third and final round of coil folds. Your seeds should be well incorporated by
now. If they aren’t, do some extra folds. Leave covered with a wet tea towel and wait
for approximately 1 hour.

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Step 6: Shaping
Flour your benchtop and tip the dough out. Repeat what you did in step two, pulling
the corners of the dough ball into the centre and going around.

Then flip the dough over so you’ve got the smooth side on top again. Use the dough
scraper or your hands to make the dough into a nice round ball, scraping underneath
and around the dough to do this.

Step 7: Dipping the dough into the seed mixture

Get a plate and pour a mixture of sunflower, pumpkin and flax seeds onto the plate,
creating a thin layer. Spray the top of your dough with some water to make it sticky
again. Dip the top part of the loaf into the seed mixture. This will create a lovely seeded
crust for your loaf.
Note that if you forget to do this but decide you want seeds on the outside of your loaf
later on, you can do the same thing just before you bake. Just make sure you give the
loaf a good spray first so that the seeds stick.

Step 8: Into the bowl or banneton and into the fridge

Get either your clean bowl or banneton if you have one.

Line the bowl with a clean tea towel and sprinkle with flour. Then pick up the dough
and place it seam side up, seeded side down into the bowl.

Pull in the corners of the dough again to make it extra tight – this helps the bread to
rise more. Cover it with cling wrap, then put it into the fridge and leave it overnight.

Now follow the steps for ‘Baking the Bread’ (part 2) in the Easy Sourdough
recipe.

94
you can use any kind of seeds you like on and in your bread but my faves are
pumpkin, sunflower and flax

95
Dark rye and caraway sourdough bread
Similar to the buttermilk recipe but a little lighter. Another German style bread.

Ingredients:
100g sourdough starter
380g room temperature filtered water
10g salt
300g wholemeal flour
220g rye flour
Caraway seeds

Step 1: Mixing starter, water, salt and flour

Mix the sourdough starter, water and salt together until milky. Then add the wholemeal
and rye flour and mix everything together. Make sure all the flour is incorporated. It
might seem a little thicker and sticker than usual, but don’t worry. It should still form a
shaggy dough. Leave covered with a wet tea towel and wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 2: Stretch and folds

Pinch a corner of the dough, lift it up and fold it inwards. Turn the bowl and do the
same with another corner, repeating about 10 times so that the dough starts to form a
tighter ball. Again, this might be slightly more difficult than with baker’s flour, so make
sure your hands are wet and don’t stress if it seems quite sticky. Flip the dough ball
over so that the seam side is down. Fold the dough under itself, patting and smoothing
the top to make it into more of a smooth ball. Then leave it covered with a wet tea
towel and wait for approximately 1 hour.

Step 3: Coil folds no.1

Rye flour has a different type of gluten from other flours and can’t be stretched out in
the same way. If you really want, you can leave out the folds altogether. I still like to
do a couple of coil folds for the sake of the wholemeal flour in the dough, so complete
the first of only two rounds of coil folds. Then leave covered with a wet tea towel and
wait for approximately 2 hours.

Step 4: Coil folds no.2

Do your second and final round of coil folds, just the same as last time. Hopefully your
dough is less sticky by now. Leave covered with a wet tea towel and wait for
approximately 1 hour.

Step 5: Shaping
Flour your benchtop a little more than you usually would and tip the dough out. Repeat
what you did in step two, pulling the corners of the dough ball into the centre and going
around.

96
Then flip the dough over so you’ve got the smooth side on top again. Use the dough
scraper or your hands to make the dough into a nice round ball, scraping underneath
and around the dough to do this.

Step 6: Adding the caraway seeds

Create a layer of caraway seeds on a plate. Spray the top of your loaf with some water
to make it sticky again. Dip the top part of the dough into the caraway seeds.

Step 7: Into the bowl or banneton and into the fridge

Get either your clean bowl or banneton if you have one.

Line the bowl with a clean tea towel and sprinkle slightly more flour than usual over it.
Then pick up the dough and place it seam side up, caraway seed side down into the
bowl.

Pull in the corners of the dough again to make it extra tight – this helps the bread to
rise more. Cover it with cling wrap, then put it into the fridge and leave it overnight (or
longer - or shorter.)

Now follow the steps for ‘Baking the Bread’ (part 2) in the Easy Sourdough
recipe.

97
Heavy buttermilch-quark (or yoghurt) Brot
When I lived in Germany, before I ever started baking my own bread, I used to go to
the market every week and get the same loaf of Buttermilch-Quark Brot, which was
my absolute favourite bread ever. I have made a number of buttermilk sourdough
variants and even looked up the bakery to see their ingredient list for this particular
loaf. This is as close as I have managed to get. It’s a heavier German-style bread,
beautiful, moist and soft. It includes quark which is something like yoghurt that is very
common in Germany. If you can’t find quark, you can substitute it for yoghurt.

Ingredients:
80g sourdough starter
200g buttermilk (ideally at room temperature)
100g water
80g quark or yoghurt
200g rye
200g wholemeal flour
8g salt

Step 1: Mixing
First, mix together the starter, buttermilk and water. Then add the quark or yoghurt
and mix that in too. Then add the flours and salt. Mix together until you can’t see any
flour. It should have a shaggy consistency. Leave it covered with a wet tea towel for
20-30 minutes.

Step 2: Folding (sort of)

This mixture will be a lot thicker and firmer than your usual baker’s flour sourdough
mix. You can’t really do folds but you can do some little mini stretch and folds at this
stage, just to make sure everything is coming together into a nice smooth ball and all
the ingredients really are mixed in well. Then leave it covered with a wet tea towel for
1 hour.

Step 3: Coil folds (sort of)

After about an hour, come back to the dough and lift it out of the bowl, just into the air.
Let the slides of the dough fall down and then put it back into the bowl, turn it and pick
it up again. Repeat a few times. Basically, you’re doing regular coil folds but your
dough will be so stiff that you need to lift it out of the bowl to get the dough to move at
all. Not too much will happen, but don’t worry. Leave it covered with a wet tea towel
for 1 hour.

Step 4: Coil folds (sort of, again)

Repeat step 3, being a little gentler this time. Then leave it covered with a wet tea
towel for about 45 minutes.
98
Step 5: Coil folds (sort of, again)
Repeat step 4, then leave covered with a wet tea towel for about 45 minutes.

Step 6: Shaping and into the fridge

See how your dough is looking at this stage. About 4-5 hours of sitting and ‘folding’
should be right for this dough. If it has expanded in size and it’s been 4-5 hours then
it should be perfect.

Lightly flour a surface with rice flour and take your dough out of its bowl. Use your
hands to shape it into a nice round loaf, turning it around and around as you go.

Once you’ve gotten it into a nice shape, coat it with rice flour and get a bowl or
banneton. Line the bowl with a clean tea towel or sprinkle some flour into the banneton.
Place the loaf into the bowl.

If you have a bread tin, this loaf is also very nice in a tin. But don’t worry if you don’t,
the bowl will work great as well.

Cover with the tea towel or cling wrap and place into the fridge overnight.

When you are ready to bake, follow the steps for ‘Baking the Bread’ (part 2) in
the Easy Sourdough recipe.

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Seeded Brötchen (aka bread rolls)
Brötchen is one of my favourite German words. It literally means little bread, but it
actually means bread roll. These are great for a little snack and also really nice to
make and give away to people. Because they’re so small and cute it means it’s easy
to make less bread but have more to give away! The shaping process for these is also
very enjoyable! You might notice that the ingredients for this recipe are very similar to
the Easy Sourdough Recipe – they are, but the hydration (water) has been decreased
by about 10%.

*Note before baking: check whether you can turn off your fan in your oven! If you can,
great. If you can’t it just means that your crusts might be a bit different than what you’re
used to if you have been baking inside a Dutch oven. They will be thinner and harder
but the bread inside will still be nice.

Ingredients:
(Makes approx. 12 120g bread rolls)

140g sourdough starter

510g water
16g salt
30g olive oil
600g baker’s flour
150g rye flour
200g sunflower / poppy / flax / sesame / pumpkin seeds (optional)

Part 1: Making the dough

Step 1: Mixing
Mix together your starter, water and salt until milky. Then add the olive oil and mix it
in. Add your baker’s and rye flour and mix those in to form a shaggy dough.
Leave covered with a wet tea towel for about 20 minutes.

Step 2: Initial folds

After 20 minutes your dough should have changed in consistency and be smoother.
Do your first set of simple stretch and folds, pulling a corner of the dough up and folding
it back down onto itself, and turning the bowl around as you go. The dough should
start to form a neater ball-like shape. Then leave it covered with a wet tea towel for 45
minutes to 1 hour.

Step 3: Coil folds no.1

After about an hour, complete your first coil fold by lifting the dough up out of the bowl
and letting the edges fall down past your fingers (see the Easy Sourdough Recipe for
more detail on this folding method). Turn the dough around and repeat on the other
100
side. Do this a few more times until the dough starts to become nice and smooth and
to form more of a ball shape, then leave covered with a wet tea towel for about 1 hour.

Step 4: Coil folds no.2

After an hour, do another round of coil folds. You might see some nice bubbles forming
in the dough around now. You will also probably notice that this dough is thicker, more
dense and a bit easier to handle than the usual sourdough mixture. This is because
there is less water in the dough and it’s supposed to be like this, so don’t worry! Then
leave it covered with a wet tea towel for about 1 hour.

Step 5: Coil folds no.3

Complete another, final round of coil folds, being nice and gentle with the dough this
time, as much as you can anyway. It should now have been about 4-5 hours that your
dough has been at room temperature and your dough should have increased in size.

Step 6: Into the fridge

Now you can get a big Tupperware container, put your dough inside and put it into the
fridge overnight. That’s right, no need for shaping or anything - just into some kind of
container with a lid and into the fridge.

If you want to skip the overnight proof and bake your bread rolls on the same day, you
definitely can. Just leave them out at room temperature for another 1.5 / 2 hours (as
always, depending on the weather) and follow the instructions for shaping and baking
below. I prefer the taste that develops when you leave them in the fridge so this is
what I always do, but sometimes things need to happen quickly, I understand!

Just like with the regular loaves, you can also leave this dough in the fridge for longer
than 12 hours and it will be fine.

Part 2: Shaping and Baking (the next day)

Step 1: Preheating the oven

Preheat your oven to its maximum temperature (approx. 250 degrees Celsius). You
can start shaping the rolls while it’s heating up. Get some kind of oven proof vessel
(like a cake tin or tray) to put at the bottom of the oven and let it heat up with the oven.
You’re going to pour water into this later to create steam.

Step 2: Shaping
Take your dough out of the fridge. It probably will have gotten even bigger overnight;
mine has popped the lid of the Tupperware container off before! Very lightly flour a
surface and tip your dough onto it. Get a dough scraper and cut the dough up into 12
pieces, approximately 120g each. I like to use the scales for this but you don’t have
to.
101
Once you’ve got the 12 pieces, take one and fold the edges into the centre, like you
would when shaping a normal sized boule (round loaf). Then use the palm of your
hand to roll it into a nice round ball. Get two trays lined with baking paper and place
the dough ball on a tray. Try to use minimal flour while shaping because too much
flour will make it difficult to get them into the shape you want them, and if you’re adding
seeds they won’t stick. Just keep wetting your hands instead of using so much flour.

Step 3: Rolling in seeds (optional)

If you want seeded bread rolls, get a plate and tip your seeds onto the plate. Take your
little dough balls and roll the tops of the ball into the seeds. Then give the bottoms a
little dusting of flour so they don’t stick to the baking paper. You can sprinkle some
flour over the tops of the rolls too, if you like the look of the white flour.

Then place it back onto the baking tray. Repeat for all 12 rolls. You want the rolls to
be nicely spaced out so that they have enough room to rise without touching each
other. If the edges touch, that part of the crust will taste fine, but won’t be able to get
nice and crusty.

Step 4: Scoring and spraying with water

You can now score them with a single slash or a little cross. Once you’ve scored them,
give your buns a nice spray of water with a little water spray bottle.

Step 5: Loading the buns into the oven and turning the oven down to 225 C
Once your oven is nice and hot, turn off the fan if possible. Boil about 300ml of water
and have it ready to go. Put your buns into the oven and then pour the water into the
cake tin or tray that you put in there earlier. Hopefully this creates lots of steam. Be
really careful when you’re doing this not to get burnt! Then close the door of the oven.
Turn the temperature down to 225 degrees. Don’t open the oven door again for 25
minutes. This is because you need to keep the steam in.

Step 6: Releasing the steam

After 25 minutes of baking, you can open the oven door for a few seconds to release
the steam inside the oven (it’s the same thing happening as when you take the lid off
the Dutch oven). Bake for a further 15-20 minutes, or until your buns are looking nice
and golden brown. Keep an eye on them so that you find the perfect time to take them
out of the oven.

Then let them cool and enjoy, or give them away and people will love them!

102
galette with strawberries and blueberries

103
Fruit galettes
So these aren’t actually sourdough but I love making these because they are so simple
and versatile and it’s nice to give people a little something sweet along with gifting
them a loaf! You can use really any kind of fruit that is in season - orange, peach,
strawberry, blueberry or plums! I suggest making sure you have rolling pin before
trying to make these. I tried once without (using a wine bottle) and it was doable but it
was a struggle! They use rye flour which gives them a lovely texture and depth of
flavour.
Inspired by the Tivoli Road Bakery book – this book has so many amazing recipes (including
bread recipes) inside and I have learnt so much from it!

Ingredients

For the dough

250g dark rye flour
100g plain flour
1tsp salt
225g butter chilled and cubed
150g sour cream
2 tbsp water

For the fruit

5 peaches / plums / 2 oranges / 1.5 punnets of strawberries cut up (or other fruit of
your choice!)
90g white sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

Step 1: Mixing the dough ingredients

Mix the flour and salt in a bowl. Add the cubed butter and mix it together with your
fingers to create a kind of crumble. It’s mixed enough when the bits of butter are
about pea sized. Add the sour cream and water to this mixture. You can mix in
initially with a spoon, and then start using your hands.

Step 2: Kneading
Once the mixture has come together, knead it a little in the bowl then take it out.
Lightly flour your work bench and rolling pin. Use the rolling pin to roll the mixture out
until it is about 1-2cm thick, then fold it back up into a little rectangle and then roll it
out again.

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Step 3: Into the fridge for 30 minutes
Now put the dough onto a baking paper lined tray and back into the fridge for about
half an hour, so the butter doesn’t get too soft.

Step 4: Making the fruit mix

While your dough is in the fridge, make your fruit mix. Cut up your fruit of choice into
small-ish bite-size pieces. Add the sugar and cinnamon and mix together, then set
aside. At this stage you can also preheat the oven to 180 degrees.

Step 5: Folding and rolling the dough

Get your dough out of the fridge. Fold it up again and roll it out a couple of times.
This helps to build some dough strength.

Step 6: Cutting out circles

Once you have rolled out and folded your dough a few times, roll it out nice and thin
and cut out about 7 or 8 circles, approximately 15cm wide. Take the dough left over
from the edges of the circles, use the rolling pin to combine it and roll it back out and
keep cutting more circles.
Once you’ve cut all your dough into circles, take them individually and roll them out
even thinner and try to make them reasonably round. They don’t need to be perfect
because you’re going to be folding the edges in anyway.
If you don’t want to make all the galettes on the same day for whatever reason, you
can actually put your dough circles into the fridge and leave them for up to 5 days,
resuming the process from this step onwards later.

Step 7: Adding the fruit

Take your fruit mixture and spoon some into the centre of your dough circle. Think of
the galette like a taco: you don’t want to go crazy and overfill it. Leave the edges of
the dough circle free and then fold them in towards the centre, making a kind of bowl
which your fruit can stay inside, but with the fruit still visible in the middle.

Step 8: Into the fridge again

Put your galettes onto a baking tray and then into the fridge for about 20 minutes.
This is to stop them from losing their form when you put them in the oven.

Step 9: Baking
Bake at 180 degrees Celsius for 20-25 minutes or until golden. Then take them out,
let them cool and enjoy!!

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106
Sourdough croissants
I actually intend to make a whole book about croissants, because after making them
a few times I quickly realised there is a lot to know, a lot you can do with them, and
there are many ways to manipulate the process of making them – just like with the
bread.

I avoided making croissants for a long time because every time I read a croissant
recipe I just wanted to cry. They were always so long and had so many steps and
always began with a disclaimer about how your croissants were probably not going to
turn out very well - even if you followed all the steps. But then I realised that there were
so many similar recipes for sourdough and it really didn’t need to be that complicated.

So here is my somewhat simplified version of how you can make sourdough

croissants, although it is nonetheless long!

Croissants are a long process, just like bread. You start them (at least) the day before
you want to make them, or you can also draw out the process over a few days (I’ve
taken up to 4 days.)

This recipe has been inspired by @autumn.kitchen and @cheatdaycooking, who also have a
lot of really helpful tips and videos on technique for making these! This is something for
which it does just really help to watch a video to understand the steps! I’ve also made a
series of reels about the process that you might find helpful!

Tools
Rolling pin
Ruler
Baking paper
Rice flour
4mm high sticks (optional, for working out whether you have rolled out the dough thin
enough or not – 4mm is the thickness you are aiming for)
Glad wrap
A paint brush or pastry brush
Knife

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Ingredients

For the sweet starter For the croissant For the butter For glazing
50g sourdough starter dough block 1 egg yolk
40g baker’s flour or 120g bread or pizza 130g unsalted A splash of
plain flour flour European butter milk
10g white caster sugar 100g 00 flour (find one with at
20g water 30g unsalted butter least 82% fat
cubed, room temp content), room
5g salt temp
90g sweet starter
30g sugar
90g water

Part 1: Making the sweet starter

Measure out your sourdough starter into a jar with a lid. Add your sugar, flour and
water and mix well. Leave it for 4-7 hours (depending on the weather), until the starter
has risen and become bubbly.

Part 2: Making the dough

Step 1: Mixing the ingredients
Once your sweet starter has risen you can make the dough. Measure out your sweet
starter into a bowl. Add the 00 flour and bread/pizza flour, salt, sugar, butter and water,
and mix it together. Note that bread/pizza flour is different from baker’s flour - but if
you only have baker’s or plain flour that will be okay too. I like to use my hands to mix
the dough together, to make sure that all the butter gets mixed in really well and there
aren’t any clumps left. This will take a few minutes. Don’t worry about being super
gentle with the dough or anything at this stage. The dough will have a cauliflower look
to it and that’s fine. Once you’ve mixed the dough together well, leave it covered with
a wet tea towel for about 15 minutes.
Step 2: An extra mix / knead
After about 15 minutes, knead the dough a few times, making sure everything is really
mixed in well. Be gentler with it this time. It should have changed from the cauliflower
consistency and be more like a nice smooth ball.
Step 3: First round of proving
Leave the dough covered with a wet tea towel for about as long as you would leave
your sourdough bread dough to prove – but you don’t need to do any more folds. If it’s
really warm weather (27+ degrees), leave it for 4 or so hours. If it’s cooler, leave it
closer to 6 or 7. If it’s quite cold (17 or less), you can even leave the dough out
overnight. Once it is looking puffier and bubbly, put it into the fridge covered with cling
wrap until you are ready to go to the next step.
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Part 3: Making the butter block
Step 1: Making a 15x15cm square
While your dough is proving, you can make your butter block. This means getting your
block of butter and making it into a 15x15cm square, which you are going to fold into
your dough later.
Get a piece of baking paper and mark out the four corners of a 15x15cm square on
the paper. Get your butter and cut it into a few small thin pieces and place them inside
of the square, not too close to the edges.
Fold the edges of the baking paper inwards to make a square and fully cover the butter
and use the rolling pin to roll out the butter so that it becomes a smooth, flat 15x15cm
square, trapped inside of the baking paper.

Step 2: Letting the butter harden up in the fridge

Put your square butter block into the fridge. It’s important that the butter has some time
to get cold again once it’s shaped into the square. I usually do this step on the same
day that I make the dough but you could also do it before you begin part 4.

Part 4: Making the croissants

Step 1: Rolling out the dough to 16cm x 32cm
Very lightly flour your surface with rice flour. Do this any time you are handling the
croissant dough throughout this recipe. Get your dough out of the fridge and roll it out
to a 16x32cm rectangle. Basically, you want the dough to be slightly bigger than double
the size of your butter block. Try to make the dough fairly even. If your dough is rolled
too big, cut off the edges, put them back into the middle and roll it out some more until
it’s the right size.

Dough

Butter block

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Step 2: Adding the butter block to the dough
Now get your butter block out of the fridge. Put it in the middle of the dough and fold
the top and bottom of your rectangle into the centre until they touch. They don’t need
to overlap, but they should just meet. Then make sure the sides of the dough touch
too, and that the butter block is completely encased in the dough. The seam of the
shape facing you will look like picture A below. Turn it around so that the seam is
vertical, like picture B.

Picture A Picture B

Step 3: Rolling out the dough again to 20x45cm

Once you’ve turned the dough around so that the seam is vertical instead of horizontal,
you can start rolling out the dough again. Try to work relatively quickly so that the
butter doesn’t get too warm. If it’s become really squishy, just put the dough back into
the fridge for a little while so that it can harden up. When you are rolling, be gentle and
don’t push down too much on the butter. It’s more like spreading it evenly on a piece
of toast than smooshing it down into the toast.
Keep rolling the dough until you get a nice rectangle. You can use the sticks to help
you work out whether you’ve found the right width (4mm). The 45cm part of the
rectangle should be the part that had the seam facing you vertically.
Step 4: Book fold
Once you have a relatively accurately- sized rectangle (it doesn’t have to be perfect),
cut off any rounded edges at the top and bottom of the rectangle.
Fold the top and bottom halves of your rectangle into the centre so that they meet.
Then fold the dough in half. If this has made no sense, watch my reels about the steps
of making croissants, then it will make more sense (saved in my story highlights under
‘croix process’)!
Cover the dough with glad wrap and put it back into the fridge for 1 hour, so that it can
get nice and cool again. You can also leave it for way longer than this (I’ve left it for a
whole day) but you shouldn’t leave it for shorter! This is the case for any of the steps
in the lamination process.

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Step 5: Rolling out the dough to a 20x45cm rectangle again
Get your dough back out of the fridge and roll it out to a 20x45cm rectangle. The long
part of your dough can remain the long part of your rectangle. It helps to roll out the
width first before you roll out the length. Once you have a nice rectangle, cut off the
rounded parts of the top and bottom if they’re not straight.
Step 6: Letter fold
You are going to fold the dough into thirds, like a letter. Take the top third of your
dough and fold it about two thirds of the way down. Then take the bottom third of your
dough and fold it up so that it again makes a nice neat rectangle. Now put your dough
back into the fridge, covered with cling wrap, for at least 1 hour – or longer.
Step 7: Rolling out the dough to 26x36cm
Roll out the dough again, this time to 26x36cm or thereabouts (it doesn’t matter that
much.) Make sure it’s a nice even rectangle and cut the edges off of the dough to
achieve this again. Keep the edges of the dough that you cut off and turn them into a
weirdly formed pastry, if you like. Just set them aside for now.
Step 8: Cutting triangles
I always get confused at this step and my triangles are never perfectly even sizes, so
if you’re aiming for geometric perfection you might need to look at another recipe. But
this is what I do. I’ve tried two different methods and I will share both with you. First,
lay your dough out horizontally.
Method one: Measure out 10cm, 20cm and 30cm and make a mark with your knife at
each of those points on top of the dough.
Then, on the bottom of the dough, measure out 5cm and 15cm and make a mark.
Then you connect the dots to make right-angle triangles. Maybe the picture below will
help it to make more sense. This will make 6 croissants (two of which, from either end,
will be slightly dodgy shapes but I always keep them!) Plus, now you can also get your
ends that you cut off and roll them into some kind of shape – be creative, whatever
you like!
10cm 20cm 30cm

5cm 15cm

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Method two: You can divide your dough into three rectangles and then just cut each
rectangle diagonally. Sometimes I do this because it’s simpler but they don’t come
out quite as neat.

If it’s warm where you are you might need to put your dough in the fridge again at this
stage to harden up a bit. If the butter isn’t feeling squishy, keep going without any
additional refrigeration.
Step 9: Rolling up the croissants
This is my favourite step! Get your triangle and stretch it out a little, being quite gentle.
Stretch out the end and the bottom.
Then get your knife and make a little incision at the middle of the bottom of the triangle.
Then roll up the triangle from the larger bottom part to the top.
Place on a tray covered with baking paper and repeat until you’ve rolled up all your
triangles.

Step 10: Proving for 8-24 hours

Once you’ve given them all a coat of egg and milk mix and you’re ready to bake them,
place them somewhere warm and allow them to prove for about half a day, or if it’s
cool where you are, you can leave them even longer. I know it sounds like a very long
time but they take a very long time to prove because of the butter in the dough. I like
to leave them (as with the sweet starter) in a switched-off oven with a tray of warm
water to speed up the process a little. Make sure the water isn’t boiling though,
because the butter might melt out of the croissants. You don’t need to cover them with
anything because the egg wash will help to stop them from drying out.
You can tell that the croissants are ready when they have a soft spongy texture. They
will look puffy and jiggly. You might start to see some of the layers of dough and butter
spreading apart too. Wait until they look like this before you bake them. Once your
croissants are looking puffy and jiggly, they are ready to bake. You can give them an
extra layer of egg wash at this stage if you like.

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Part 5: Baking the croissants
Step 1: Preheat the oven to 190 degrees
Step 2: Coating the croissants with egg wash
Now you can mix together one egg yolk and a splash of milk and put them in a little
cup. Get your brush and paint the croissants with the mixture.
Try to only paint the smooth parts. Avoid the parts where you can see the layers of
butter. This helps give them a nice light and dark coloured pattern when you bake
them.
Step 3: Bake at 190 for 10 minutes
Step 4: Bake for a further 8-10 minutes at 180 degrees
Keep an eye on the croissants and take them out when they look nice and golden
brown. Let them cool a little before you eat them!

Yay, you’ve made it to the end of the very long croissant recipe, but hopefully it wasn’t
as difficult as it was long!

Note: if your croissants leak butter when you bake them, it means they were probably
underproved. Don’t worry, they will still taste great and it’s not a big deal. Just try out
giving them more proving time next time.
One more note: You can add chocolate to your croissants to make them even more
delicious, just take some chocolate buds and put them at the bottom of the triangle
when you’re shaping the croissants.

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Vegan Kardamomschnecken (vegan cardamom scrolls)
I love scrolls so much and I am so excited that I am able to make my own! I actually
never thought that this was something I would be able to do, it always seemed too
hard. Scrolls are just like croissants, but easier! And in my opinion they’re equally
delicious! I enjoy making these especially, because they are one of the things that my
friends seem to be most excited to receive. They make the perfect surprise
accompaniment to a loaf of bread! Also, I love the German word for cardamom scrolls
so much: Kardamomschnecken, which directly translates to cardamom snails! Get
ready with this recipe, you’re going to use the best part of a whole tub of Nuttelex!

Makes approx. 8 scrolls

Tools you’ll need

Rolling pin
Pastry brush or little paint brush
Deep oven tray

Ingredients
For the dough
110g sourdough starter
250g oat milk
4g salt
400g white baker’s flour
80g Nuttelex (with salt is fine)
50g white sugar

For the paste

120g Nuttelex (margarine)
120g brown sugar
6g cardamom
3g cinnamon (optional but I like the combo!)

For the glaze

30g warm water
20g brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

Part 1: Making the dough

Step 1: Mixing your ingredients
*I usually start making these in the evening and finish them off in the morning the next
day.
Get a large mixing bowl and put your sourdough starter in. Then add the salt (I do this
step before I add the liquid so that I have visual confirmation that it’s there and know I

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haven’t forgotten to add it later down the track!). Then add the oat milk and give the
ingredients a little stir to form a milky liquid.
Next add the sugar, Nuttelex and flour and mix everything together until a shaggy
dough forms. Leave covered with a wet tea towel for about 20 minutes.
After 20 minutes come back and use your hands to mix the dough together, making
sure everything is really well incorporated. Then cover with a wet tea towel and leave
on the kitchen bench.
Step 2: Let the dough develop
This part depends a little on the weather, just like with the bread. Because your dough
has Nuttelex in it (butter also has the same effect) the proving process happens more
slowly than with your usual bread dough.
If it’s about 16-20 degrees in your kitchen you can definitely leave this dough out
overnight for 8-12 hours. If it’s warmer than that, it will be closer to 6-8 hours. Just like
with the bread, you will notice the dough grow and change with time. When you can
see it has visibly grown and become smoother (or when it’s been enough time
according to how warm it is in your kitchen), you can transfer the dough to the fridge.
You can give your dough a few coil folds while it’s developing if you like, to see how it
is feeling.
The dough doesn’t need to spend a long time in the fridge, but it can if you want it to.
It should be in there for a minimum of about 30 minutes so that it cools down and
becomes firmer and easier to work with but you can actually leave it in there for a
whole day (or longer), if life gets busy.

Part 2: Making the cardamom paste and the scrolls

Step 1: Making the paste
Mix together the cardamom (and cinnamon if you’re adding it), Nuttelex and brown
sugar in a bowl. You can use your hands, or a spoon, or both! Set aside for now.
Step 2: Rolling out the dough and spreading on the paste
The vegan based dough can be a bit softer and trickier to handle than dough made
with butter. If you find it’s getting super soft during the rolling and shaping process, put
it back in the fridge for 20 or so minutes and it should harden up. Then you can
continue. Also, if when you get to making your knots, they don’t end up looking as neat
because of the softer dough, don’t worry, they will look good when you bake them!
To begin, take the dough out of the fridge and put it onto a floured surface. Flour the
top side of the dough too. As always I recommend using rice flour. Use a rolling pin to
roll it out into a large rectangle (about 20x40cm and about 4mm thick but it really
doesn’t need to be too exact). Spread the cardamom paste over 2/3 of the rectangle.

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Now you’re going to do a letter fold. So, fold up the end of the rectangle that doesn’t
have any paste on it and fold down the other end on top of it, so that your rectangle
has been folded up into thirds like a letter.
Then roll out the dough again into an approx. 20x40cm rectangle (or slightly larger).
Have the rectangle so that the long side is horizontal and cut strips about 5-6cm wide.
You should end up with 6-8 strips. Then cut each one of those strips in half, but not
quite to the end, so you end up with two little flaps.
Get a deep baking tray and line it with baking paper.
Take one strip, and take each strap and put it over the other, alternating – kind of like
plaiting but with two ends instead of three. I made a reel about this because it’s really
hard to explain in writing, but it’s actually super simple, so check my insta to see what
I mean, the post is from August 12!
Then tie it into a knot, wrapping it around your hand and pulling it through. Again, the
video makes this a lot clearer! Then place it in the tray.
Repeat until you have a tray full of lovely little knots. They can be packed into the tray
fairly tightly, that’s ok.
Step 3: Proving
Let your knots prove and get nice and puffy. This should happen within about 2-3
hours depending on the temperature of your kitchen. If it’s cold in the kitchen you can
put them into the oven with just the light on to make a nice warm environment for
them to prove in. I like to give them a little spray of water so that they don’t dry out.
Step 4: Baking
Once they’re looking puffier, they’re ready to bake. Take them out of the oven and
preheat it to 220 degrees.
Once the oven is hot, the scrolls can go in. Bake for about 20-30 minutes. Keep an
eye on them from about 20 minutes onwards and take them out when they are looking
nice and golden. It will depend on your oven how long that takes.
Step 5: Glazing
While the scrolls are baking, mix together your water, cinnamon and brown sugar for
the glaze in a little cup. Once you’ve taken the scrolls out of the oven, while they are
still hot, use a pastry brush or a small paint brush to brush the glaze over the scrolls.
This will give them a nice shiny colour. Don’t be tempted to put too much on or it will
make them go crunchy like a toffee apple (unless you want that, then do!).
For a nice visual effect sprinkle a little brown sugar over the top of the scrolls and it
will stick nicely onto the glaze.
Finally, take them out of the tray and put them onto a cooling rack. Let them cool down
a little and then enjoy your scrolls with a friend and a cup of coffee!

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Simple sourdough focaccia
I resisted making a focaccia for a really long time, mainly because I just wasn’t sure
how to do it. I have great news: after finally making it, I have now discovered it’s so
easy! Even easier than making a loaf! And people get really excited every time I make
this one! The process is basically the same as making any other bread, it’s just that
instead of shaping it you put it into the tin and then just bake it!

A note on proofing: you can use the ‘easy sourdough’ method where you put the dough
in the fridge overnight before baking or the ‘backwards bread’ method where you leave
it on the counter for longer and then bake without having put it into the fridge.

Makes one large focaccia

I’ve made this recipe to make just over 1kg of dough, to fit my oven tin (‘Hemmabak’
from Ikea 36x27cm) but if you have a smaller tin, you could just use the same
measurements for my ‘medium sized loaf’ (see p.28) and add 15g of olive oil – or even
the small loaf and add 12g of oil.

Ingredients
120g sourdough starter
12g salt
450g water
20g olive oil (plus extra to grease the tin)
600g plain / baker’s / 00 flour
Flaky sea salt and any other additions e.g. rosemary, dried basil, olives, cherry
tomatoes

Part 1: Dough
Step 1: Mixing your ingredients
Mix the starter, salt olive oil and water together and combine to form a milky liquid.
Then add the flour (any of the flours above will work great or you could even use
wholemeal for a different effect!) and mix to form a shaggy dough.
Let rest on the counter covered with a wet tea towel for 20 minutes.

Step 2: Proofing
After 20 minutes do one stretch and fold so that the dough becomes more smooth.
Then you can leave the dough on the counter covered with a wet tea towel for 4-6
hours, depending on the weather in summer I do 4 and in winter I do about 6). You
can do a few coil folds throughout the process but you don’t have to.

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Then put the dough, as is, into the fridge. I like to take it out of the bowl and wrap it in
glad wrap so that it’s easier to fit into the fridge because my fridge is always full of
bread but you can also just put some glad wrap over the top of the bowl.
Leave it in the fridge overnight or for a few days!
An alternative: instead of leaving the dough in the fridge, you can let it proof at room
temperature for an extra couple of hours – just like you would for the backwards bread,
and then go straight to part 2 below.

Part 2: Focaccia
Step 1: Preparing the focaccia
When you and your dough are ready to bake, preheat your oven to 240 C.
Get your oven tray and put a generous amount of olive oil into the tray. The olive oil
makes it taste great and also helps keep the dough from sticking when you bake it.
Then get your dough and put some olive oil onto that too. Then gently stretch it out
into a rectangle and plonk it into the tray.
Drizzle a little more olive oil over the top. Turn the dough over and make sure it is well
coated.
Get your toppings: lots of flaky sea salt and anything else you’d like to add (I’ve been
adding rosemary) and sprinkle them over the top. Make sure any additions you put on
top are well coated in olive oil beforehand so that they doesn’t burn.
And now the best part: dimple the dough by pushing your fingers into the dough. This
is very fun and creates a nice bumpy effect in the dough.
Leave on the dough in the tray on the counter for about 20 minutes while your oven
reaches full heat.

Step 2: Baking
Give the focaccia a spray of water. You can give it one last dimple with your fingers!
Then turn the oven down to 220 C.
Bake at 220 C with fan for 35-45 minutes or until the top is golden brown. I suggest
keeping an eye on it from the 30 minute mark, it will depend on your oven how long
exactly it takes. The colour is much more an indicator of readiness than the time, so
go by that.
When you take it out of the oven, wait a few minutes and then flip it out of the tray and
onto a cooling rack. Let it cool at least a little bit :) and then enjoy!

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Simple sourdough pizza
Only recently (two years after I started baking sourdough) did I realise that the whole
time I’d been making bread dough, I was actually also making pizza dough. You can
actually make pizza using the dough from pretty much any of the (savoury) recipes in
this book! But here’s a super simple step by step guide for how to make and bake
pizza dough in your home oven.

Makes two pizzas (serves 2-3 people)

You can bake them both on the same night or leave the dough for one in the fridge for
a few days and have it later. Of course, you can also simply halve the recipe if you
only want to make one pizza.

Ingredients

For the dough

80g bubbly sourdough stater
8g salt
300g water
400g baker’s flour

Toppings (suggestion)
Fresh mozzarella
Tomato paste
Cherry tomatoes
Fresh and dried basil
Flaky sea salt

Step 1: Dough
Mix together the sourdough starter, salt and water to form a milky liquid. Then add in
the flour and combine to form a shaggy dough. Leave for 20 minutes or up to 1 hour
and then do one stretch and fold to make sure everything is well mixed in and so that
the dough becomes a little smoother. Then leave covered with a wet tea towel.

Step 2: Dough development

From this point, let the dough develop according to the temperature that day, just like
you would with a regular loaf of bread. You can follow the easy sourdough method
(leaving it 4-6 additional hours, doing folds every hour or so, and then leaving it
unshaped in the fridge overnight) or the backwards bread method (leaving it out on
the counter for an additional 7-9 hours, overnight).

Step 3: Preparing and baking

Preheat your oven to 260C or as hot as it will go with a pizza stone inside (if you don’t
have one that’s okay).
119
When you’re ready to bake your pizza, take a piece of parchment paper and sprinkle
a little flour over it. Divide your dough into two and coat with a little olive oil. Divide
your dough into two and stretch out one dough ball as wide as you can using wet
hands and then plop it onto your piece of parchment paper. Stretch it out further and
try and make it as round as you can (just for aesthetics). You want the dough to be
stretched out quite thin.

Add your toppings. My favourite combo is a little tomato paste, dried basil, flaky sea
salt, a few sliced cherry tomatoes and a little fresh mozzarella (you’ll add more later).

Use a pizza peel to transfer your pizza to the pizza stone if you have one. Or if you
don’t have a pizza stone, place the parchment paper onto a baking tray and in both
cases bake at 260C for 15-25 minutes. Keep an eye on the pizza and wait until it’s
golden brown, but make sure it doesn’t burn.

Step 4: Final touches

When you take your pizza out of the oven get some extra mozzarella and some fresh
basil and sprinkle it over. You can return it to the switched off but still hot oven for a
couple of minutes so that the cheese melts and the basil wilts a little.

Then enjoy your home made sourdough pizza!

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Backwards Shokupan
For lovers of supermarket bread (like my dad) this is the perfect soft, fluffy loaf of
sourdough. It’s kind of like brioche. Because it’s made with sourdough and milk instead
of water, the texture is somewhere in between supermarket bread and a regular
sourdough loaf. It won’t be as crazy fluffy and soft and cake-like as white supermarket
bread because you’re using sourdough instead of commercial yeast.

This is an ‘enriched’ dough which means you’ve added butter and/or milk (in this case,
both) to the dough. Fats slow the fermentation process so this recipe includes quite a
lot of starter – which speeds up the fermentation process, putting the proofing time
usually at about the same as it would be for any other loaf.

You can also do this not as a ‘backwards bread’ by making the proofing time a little
shorter (e.g. 2 hours less) and then putting it into the fridge overnight. Then take it out
and shape it in the morning. You can make a vegan version of this loaf using oat milk
and 40g instead of 50g of margarine), the flavour will be a little different but still delish.

Makes one medium sized loaf

I’ve made this recipe to fit into my 20x10x11cm bread tin with a lid but if you don’t have
a bread tin with a lid, you could either use a cake tin with a piece of foil on top, or you
could just as easily shape it to be round and bake it in the Dutch oven.

Ingredients
225g starter
60g sugar
8g salt
250g milk
50g butter (room temperature, cubed)
350g baker’s flour

Part 1: Dough
Mix everything together in a bowl. I don’t bother mixing anything in in a particular order,
I just mix. I start out with a spoon and then mix with wet hands. Don’t worry if the butter
doesn’t get mixed in perfectly at the beginning. Squish the cubes as much as you can
so it starts to incorporate and then leave covered with a wet tea towel for 20 minutes.
After 20 minutes do a stretch and fold, squish more of the butter in, and leave covered
with a wet tea towel for about 6-8 hours in warmer weather or 10-12 in cooler weather.
I’ve never had one of these overproof so don’t stress too much about it.
Part 2: Shaping and baking
Preheat your oven to 240 C degrees.

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Get your dough and do a few coil folds using wet hands. The consistency should have
changed now, it should have come together and be smoother. It should be less sticky
than it was when you first mixed it. If it’s still feeling really sticky you could give it some
more time (this happened to me only once when it was really really cold in my kitchen
overnight).
Divide the dough in half. On a lightly floured surface, roll each dough ball into kind of
a loose sausage shape, then roll it up from the long end, and roll it up again until it’s
kind of come together into a small ball. There’s a story highlight called ‘shokupan’ on
my Instagram page that might help you get what I mean by ‘rolling it up’. It’s just really
hard to explain with words, but so simple when you see a picture! Below is also my
attempt at explaining using ‘shapes’ by Microsoft Word. If in doubt you can just shape
it into a ball as you would with a normal round loaf.

The loose sausage shape and then roll it up longways

Now repeat to shape the second half of the dough. Take your tin and line it with butter
and flour like you would if you were going to bake a cake. Then place both little balls
into your loaf tin.
Let them rest for about 20-45 minutes (you can skip this if you’re in a hurry), until your
oven has reached maximum heat.
Give them a spray of water and then turn the oven down to 220C and bake for 25
minutes with the lid on.
Then remove the lid and bake for another 20 minutes, or until the top of the loaf is
golden brown.
It’s really important with the shokupan that you wait until it’s cooled before you cut into
it. If you cut it too early, the texture goes kind of weird. I know, because I did this and
thought that I had done something wrong with the recipe / hadn’t baked it long enough,
but that’s not it. You’ve just gotta let the delicate milk dough rest once it comes out of
the oven and it will reach a lovely consistency. Patience is a virtue when it comes to
sourdough, yet again!

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now (hopefully) you won’t have to buy this kind of bread anymore!

123
Sourdough
discard recipes
What to do when you have leftover sourdough starter

124
Wholemeal za’atar discard crackers
It has been said that these crackers are even better than my bread. They are salty
and crunchy and just really satisfying to eat. We always have some in our cupboard
for when you’re looking for a snack, and they always disappear so quickly so I’m
frequently making new batches.

You can switch around types of flour: use plain, or try adding in some rye or spelt. I
love za’atar and always have some handy in the drawer but there are lots of other
options too: simply leave it out and use a little extra flaky sea salt, use other dried
herbs e.g. thyme or basil.

The discard can be quite old or it can also just be your bubbly, active starter. You
can also mix these and then leave them in the fridge overnight (or longer) and bake
them later, that way they’ll develop some extra flavour.

Makes 1 tray

Ingredients
50g sourdough discard
40g sunflower seeds
40g sesame seeds
4g salt
50g water
20g olive oil
100g wholemeal flour

Topping
Za’atar (optional but delicious)
Flaky sea salt

Step 1
Mix discard, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, salt, water and olive oil together in a
mixing bowl. Then add the flour and continue to mix. Once the ingredients are well
combined you can leave the dough ball wrapped in plastic wrap in the fridge overnight
(or longer), or you can move to Step 2 right away.

Step 2
Preheat the oven to 190C.

Place the dough ball onto a piece of parchment paper about the size of your baking
tray. Lightly flour the dough and then using a rolling pin, begin rolling the dough out.

As you’re doing this, sprinkle some flaky sea salt and za’atar (if using) over the partially
rolled out dough, and continue to roll it out until it’s around 2mm thick. This helps the
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toppings to stick. The thinner you make it, the crispier your crackers will be. Make sure
you’ve rolled it out evenly so that the edges are the same thickness as the middle (to
ensure even baking).

Step 3
Bake at 190C with the fan on (if you have one) for around 30 minutes, turning the tray
around mid-bake. Continue baking until crispy and golden brown. Allow to cool for 15
minutes.

Step 4 (the best part!)

When what is currently one really big cracker has cooled, break it into smaller pieces
to give a rustic effect. Simply snap pieces off with your fingers until they’re your desired
size.

Eat right away or you can store them in an air tight jar for quite some time (but they
never stick around long!).

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Double chocolate sourdough discard cookies
If you are someone who regularly makes cookies, you might feel doubtful about my
no-method-method of making these cookies, whereby I put everything into a bowl
and mix it. But it works, I promise. Taking a similar approach to my approach to the
bread, I appreciate minimalism and where possible try to avoid using kitchen
appliances.

These cookies are so soft and gooey and for better or worse, they’re addictive! My
dad said, ‘Mary I think you could sell these.’ When he tried them. I think he’s right. If
you make these cookies, people are going to be asking for more of them.

If you have access to freshly milled flour a delicious variation of this recipe is to
replace 350g of plain flour with 300g of fresh milled wholewheat flour. It makes
amazingly delicious and creamy cookies.

Your discard can be quite fresh or it can be a little older as well. It doesn’t need to be
super active. However, ideally, because these are sweet, it shouldn’t be very very
old and acidic.

Makes approx. 20 cookies

Ingredients:
100g sourdough discard
240g margarine (I use Nuttelex original)
240g brown sugar
100g white sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
40g cocoa powder
5g salt
150g chocolate chips (plus some extra for topping)
350g plain flour

Step 1
In a large mixing bowl add the sourdough discard, margarine, brown sugar, white
sugar, baking powder, vanilla extract, egg, cocoa powder, salt and chocolate chips
(i.e. everything except the flour) and mix using a wooden spoon. Then add the flour
and continue to mix.
Step 2
Once the dough has come together, shape into 55-60g balls. I find it helps to use wet
hands if the dough is feeling super sticky and squishy. Place the balls onto a plate,
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cover with cling wrap and place in the fridge for at least one hour and up to overnight
(or longer).
You can freeze some after about 1 hour of being in the fridge, once they’ve hardened
up, if you don’t want to bake them all at once. Having cookies in your freezer is a game
changer! Just place them in a zip lock bag.

Step 3
Preheat the oven to190C with the fan on.
Take a baking tray and place the cookies spread out on the tray. Get some extra choc
chips and place them on top of each cookie ball and squish the ball down a little and
the push chocolate into the ball as you do this.
I strongly recommend baking only one tray at a time. My oven does weird things with
the way it distributes heat when I have two trays in together and I know other people
have had the same issue. If you know your oven if is fine, that’s great go ahead and
bake all the cookies! But if you’re not sure, bake one tray at a time.
Bake for 14-16 minutes depending on your personal preference of cookie squishiness
(less time = more squishy).
Remove from the oven and allow to cool on the tray for 5-10 minutes. Then move to a
cooling rack and then eat them!

128
129
Gluten free
sourdough
Because not everyone can eat regular sourdough

130
Making gluten free starter from scratch
How to make gluten free starter so that your gluten free bread can truly be 100%
gluten free

Ingredients:
50g gluten free flour e.g. brown rice, cassava, sorghum
60g water
½ tsp honey

Day 1
Mix the above ingredients together in a jar with enough room for it to rise in. Leave
them at room temperature for 24 hours. Make sure the jar isn’t 100% airtight. Leave
the lid done up only loosely, this will still allow a little bit of air to get in.

Day 2
Mix the mixture in your jar around, but don’t do anything else. Don’t add or discard
anything, just give it a mix.

Day 3
Discard about two thirds of the mixture and, once again, add the ingredients above.
Mix and leave for 24 hours.

Day 4
Continue discarding and feeding for about another 7 days (so about 10 days in total).
After this your starter should be strong enough to bake with. After about a week, you
can also stop adding the honey and just feed it the regular flour and water mixture.

The older it gets, the stronger it gets, so it will keep improving with time. You can treat
it just the same as your gluten-based starter. Store it in the fridge if you aren’t going to
bake for a while, or feed it every day if you are keeping it at room temperature.

I don’t recommend using buckwheat or white rice flour. For whatever reason these
flours haven’t worked well for me in my starter, but most other gluten free flours should
be fine.

*If you want to try out the gluten free recipe and you know whoever is going to be
eating the bread isn’t totally gluten intolerant, you can also skip making the starter from
scratch and use your everyday starter to make a gluten-free starter. To do this, take
about a teaspoon of regular starter and mix it with 50g gluten free flour and 60g of
water. If using this method, I usually feed the starter a few times before use. Because
you’re using an established starter, you don’t have to wait so long for it to be ready to
bake with, but it won’t be completely gluten free.

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Seedy sprouted gluten free sourdough
Using sprouts requires some extra organisation but it results in a lovely moist loaf with
an extra nutty flavour. Additionally, sprouts are one of the most nutritious foods out
there!

Ingredients:
100g gluten free starter
100g millet flour
225g brown rice flour
10g potato starch
20g almond flour
25g sprouted buckwheat
15g flax seed whole
15g sunflower seeds
25g psyllium husk
25g flax seed meal
8g salt
15g oil
300g water

Step 1: Mixing the dry ingredients

Measure your starter into a large bowl. Add the millet, brown rice, and almond flour,
and the potato starch. Then add the sprouted buckwheat, sunflower seeds, whole flax
seeds and mix your ingredients together.

Step 2: Mixing the wet ingredients

In a separate bowl, add the psyllium husk, flax seed meal, salt, water, and oil. Mix
together well. Make sure you give it a good mix so that the salt gets mixed in properly
– otherwise your bread might end up with a bit of a sandy texture because the salt
doesn’t get much other chance during the dough making process to get mixed in
properly.

Step 3: Mixing everything together

Add your wet ingredient mix to the dry ingredient mix and stir until they come together
and all the flour is well incorporated. You might like to use your hands for the end
phase of this mixing process.
Leave it covered with a wet tea towel for approximately 30 minutes.

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Step 4: Kneading the dough
Lightly dust a surface with rice flour and wet your hands. Take the dough out of the
bowl and begin kneading it on the bench top. This step is really making sure that all of
your ingredients are nicely mixed together and combined well. It should feel somewhat
dough-like and hold its shape okay.
Put the dough back in the bowl and leave for 1 hour, covered with a wet tea towel.

Step 5: Shaping and into a bowl or banneton

Lightly dust a surface again with rice flour and get your dough out of the bowl. Use wet
hands and some rice flour to shape it into a nice round ball. Then coat the ball with
rice flour.
Take a small sized bowl, just big enough to fit your dough into and line it with some
rice flour. It’s important that the bowl is small and deep rather than shallow because
gluten free bread does not really rise when baking - so whatever shape you make it
now is the shape it is going to be when it comes out of the oven.
Place your dough into the bowl and leave it covered with a wet tea towel for
approximately 4 hours depending on the weather (if it’s cooler it will need more time,
if it’s warmer it will need less time.) You should notice the dough visibly rise in the
container.
You don’t need to do any folds with the gluten free loaves, because folds help to
develop the gluten structure in regular sourdough - but there is no gluten in the gluten-
free loaves! So you can just abandon your loaf and come back after about 4 hours to
see whether it has risen!

Step 6: Into the fridge

Once you’ve seen that the dough has visibly risen, put it into the fridge, covered with
a wet tea towel or a piece of plastic of some sort.
Leave in the fridge overnight (or longer or a bit shorter will also be ok). If you want to
bake on the same day you can do this too. Skip the fridge step and leave the dough
out at room temperature for an additional hour or so.

Step 7: Baking
This process is more or less the same as that for my Easy Sourdough recipe, except
that the gluten free loaves tend to need a bit more time than the regular loaves.

Preheat the oven to its maximum temperature with Dutch oven inside (about 250
degrees). Get the loaf out of the fridge and coat it with rice flour to create contrast
between the crust and where you have scored.
Score the top of the loaf using a sharp blade / bread lame. I usually just score a cross
in my gluten free loaves. This usually comes out looking quite neat!
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Take out the pre-heated Dutch oven and put the loaf inside. Give the loaf a few sprays
of water to help create steam, then put the lid of the Dutch oven on and put it back in
the oven.
Bake for 10 minutes at maximum heat. After ten minutes, turn the oven down to 225
and bake for a further 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes, take the lid off of the Dutch oven and bake for a further 20 minutes.
I find sometimes gluten free loaves can take a little longer than regular sourdough
loaves, so keep an eye on it and take it out when the crust is looking nice and golden.
It might need an extra 5-10 minutes.
Once your loaf is golden and the crust is hard (you can give it a knock to test!), remove
it from the oven and let it cool completely on a cooling rack before eating it. It’s so
hard to wait, I know, but you really have to wait with the gluten free bread!!

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Chickpea gluten free sourdough loaf
I experimented with a lot of different gluten free flours before finding chickpea flour.
What I really like about chickpea flour is its light, fluffy texture and that it cooks more
quickly than some other gluten free flours. This loaf has more of a savoury flavour and
is delicious toasted with Nuttelex, topped with chopped tomatoes, olive oil, sprouts
and pepper.

Ingredients:
100g gluten free starter
100g brown rice flour
150g chickpea flour
15g almond meal
10g flaxseed whole (optional)
310g water
8g salt
25g psyllium husk
15g olive oil
20g flaxseed meal

Step 1: Mixing the wet and dry ingredients separately, and then together
Mix the brown rice flour, almond meal and chickpea flour together.
In a separate bowl, mix together the water and salt until the salt is dissolved. This step
is important because gluten free bread doesn’t require folds, so it won’t get mixed in
during the proving process.
Next, add the psyllium husk, olive oil, flaxseed meal and flaxseeds (if you’re using
them) to the water salt mixture. Then add the starter to the bowl with the flours - you
don’t have to mix it in yet though. After that, add psyllium liquid mixture to the flour and
starter and mix everything together until it’s all well incorporated.
Leave it for about one hour.

Step 2: Shaping
After about an hour, knead the dough mixture on a light-floured (rice flour) surface.
Shape the dough into a nice round ball.
Put the mixture into a small bowl (or banneton) lined with rice flour and leave it for
about 4-5 hours, or until it has visibly risen. You don’t need to do any folds for the
gluten free bread, because there’s no gluten to develop. So from this point onwards
you can just leave your loaf in the bowl or banneton and give it time to rise!
When you bake gluten free breads, they don’t rise the way that regular bread does, so
whatever shape you make your bread now will be the shape it comes out as when you
bake it. It’s good to choose a smallish bowl to prove it in so that it gets a nice round

135
shape. If you prove it in a bowl that is too big, your final loaf will end up looking really
flat.
Step 3: Into the fridge
Cover the bowl with gladwrap or a wet tea towel and put it into the fridge.
Leave overnight (8-12 hrs).

Step 4: Baking
This process is more or less the same as my Easy Sourdough recipe.
Preheat the oven to its maximum temperature with the Dutch oven inside (about 250
degrees). Get the loaf out of the fridge. Coat it with rice flour to create a contrast
between the crust and where you have scored.
Score the loaf top using a sharp blade / bread lame. I usually just score a cross in my
gluten free loaves. This usually comes out looking quite neat!
Take out the pre-heated Dutch oven and put the loaf inside. Give the loaf a few sprays
of water to help create steam, then put the lid of the Dutch oven on and put it in the
oven.
Bake for 10 minutes at maximum heat. After ten minutes, turn the oven down to 225
and bake for a further 30 minutes.
After thirty minutes, take the lid off the Dutch oven and bake for a further 15-20
minutes, or until the crust becomes nice and golden (sometimes gluten free bread
takes a bit longer so leave it in until it is really golden).
Then remove the loaf from the oven and let it cool completely on a cooling rack
before eating it. You really have to wait with the gluten free bread!!

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Lovely low FODMAP gluten free sourdough
A FODMAP friendly version of the gluten free loaf, because often people who are
gluten sensitive are also FODMAP sensitive. This version is extra easy to digest.

Ingredients:
110g gluten free starter (brown rice base would be ideal)
100g buckwheat flour
50g tapioca starch
75g millet flour
300g water
8g salt
25g psyllium husk
15g olive oil
20g flaxseed meal
10g flaxseed whole (optional)

Step 1: Mixing the dry ingredients

Put the starter into a mixing bowl. I know technically it’s not really dry, but don’t worry,
just put it in. Then add the buckwheat flour, tapioca starch, millet and whole flax seeds
(if using them) to the bowl. You don’t need to mix them together just yet, but you can
if you want.

Step 2: Mixing the wet ingredients

Measure your water out into a separate bowl. Add the salt to the water. Mix the salt
into the water until it has mostly dissolved. Then add the oil, psyllium husk and flax
seed meal. Mix to combine.

Step 3: Mixing wet and dry ingredients

Take your wet mixture and pour it onto your dry mixture. Mix it well. I like to use a bowl
scraper to do this. You will feel the psyllium husk absorbing a lot of water and making
your mixture become kind of springy.
Once all the ingredients are mixed through and no flour is visible, leave it covered with
a wet tea towel for about one hour.

Step 4: Kneading and shaping

After one hour, knead the dough mixture for a minute or two on a surface lightly floured
with rice flour. It should be feeling more dough-like than it did when you initially mixed
it together. It will still be much sticker than non-gluten dough, so keep wetting your
hands and using plenty of rice flour to stop it sticking. Shape the dough into a nice
round ball.

137
Step 5: Proving
Once you have moulded the dough into a nice round shape, put the mixture into a
small bowl (or banneton) lined with rice flour. Leave it for about 5 hours until it has
visibly risen.
You don’t actually need to do any folds for gluten free bread because there is no gluten
to develop. So you can just leave the dough proving in the bowl or the banneton.
Also, make sure the bowl is relatively small and that your bread pretty much fills up
the whole bowl because it won’t rise much when you bake it. You want to give it a nice
round shape now, while it’s proving!

Step 6: Into the fridge

Once your dough has visibly risen, cover the bowl with gladwrap or a wet tea towel
and put it into the fridge. Leave it overnight (for about 8-12 hrs).

Step 7: Baking

This process is more or less the same as that for my Easy Sourdough recipe, except
that it can take a little longer for the gluten free loaves.

Preheat the oven to its maximum temperature with the Dutch oven inside (about 250
degrees). Get the loaf out of the fridge. Coat it with rice flour to create contrast between
the crust and where you have scored.

Score the top of the loaf using a sharp blade / bread lame. I usually just score a cross
in my gluten free loaves. This usually comes out looking quite neat!
Take out the pre-heated Dutch oven and put the loaf inside. Give the loaf a few sprays
of water to help create steam, then put the lid of the Dutch oven on and put it in the
oven.
Bake for 10 minutes at maximum heat. After ten minutes, turn the oven down to 225
and bake for a further 30 minutes.
After thirty minutes, take the lid off the Dutch oven and bake for a further 20 minutes,
or until the crust becomes nice and golden. I find sometimes gluten free loaves can
take a little longer than regular sourdough loaves, so keep an eye and just take it out
when the crust is looking nice and golden.
Once your loaf is golden and the crust is hard (you can give it a knock to test!), remove
it from the oven and let it cool completely on a cooling rack before eating it.

138
Oat gluten free sourdough loaf
I really love using oat flour in my gluten free loaves. It has a nice light texture and a
really subtle flavour (some people don’t like the chickpea flavour – that’s my other
favourite gluten free flour!). Be careful if you are making gluten free bread with oat
flour for someone who is celiac because oat flour isn’t always gluten free. Check with
your local store or on the packaging to make sure that it is! If you can’t find any, you
can substitute with another flour like buckwheat or cassava.

Ingredients:
110g gluten free starter
150g gluten free oat flour (check it’s actually gluten free: some are, some aren’t !)
75g brown rice flour
8g salt
300g water
25g psyllium husk
15g olive oil
20g flaxseed meal

Step 1: Mixing the dry ingredients

Measure your starter out into a mixing bowl. Then add the oat and brown rice flour to
that bowl.

Step 2: Mixing the wet ingredients

Now measure your water out into a separate bowl. Add the salt to the water. Mix the
salt into the water until it has mostly dissolved. Make sure it’s mixed in pretty well. You
don’t do any folds for gluten free bread, so if you don’t mix it in now, it doesn’t get
many other chances to get mixed in properly and you loaf can have a bit of a sandy
texture!
Then add the oil, psyllium husk and flax seed meal. Mix to combine.

Step 3: Mixing wet and dry ingredients

Now take your wet mixture and pour it onto your dry mixture. Mix well. I like to use a
bowl scraper to do this. You will feel the psyllium husk absorbing a lot of water and
making your mixture become kind of springy.
Once all ingredients are mixed through and no flour is visible, leave covered with a
wet tea towel for about one hour.

139
Step 4: Kneading and shaping
After about one hour, knead the dough mixture for a minute or two on a surface lightly
floured with rice flour. You only need to knead the dough briefly, just to make sure the
ingredients are all well mixed in. It should be feeling more dough-like than it did when
you initially mixed it together. It will still be much sticker than non-gluten dough so keep
wetting your hands and using plenty of rice flour to stop it sticking. Shape the dough
into a nice round ball.

Step 5: Proving
Once you have moulded the dough into a nice round shape, put the mixture into a
small bowl (or banneton) lined with rice flour and leave for about 5 hours until it has
visibly risen.
With gluten free bread, you don’t need to do any stretch and folds during the process
because there is no gluten to develop so you can just abandon the loaf now and let it
proof.
A note on your choice of banneton / bowl to proof in: make sure the bowl is relatively
small and that your bread pretty much fills up the whole bowl because it won’t rise
much when you bake it. You want to give it a nice round shape now, while it’s proving!

Step 6: Into the fridge

Once your dough has visibly risen, cover the bowl with gladwrap or a wet tea towel
and put it into the fridge.
Leave overnight (8-12 hrs).

Step 7: Baking

This process is more or less the same as that for my Easy Sourdough recipe.
Preheat the oven to its maximum temperature with Dutch oven inside (about 250
degrees). Get the loaf out of the fridge. Coat it with rice flour to create contrast between
the crust and where you have scored.
Score the loaf top using a sharp blade / bread lame. I usually just score a cross in my
gluten free loaves. This usually comes out looking quite neat!
Take out the Dutch oven and put the loaf inside. Give the loaf a few sprays of water to
help create steam then put the lid of the Dutch oven on and put it in the oven.
Bake for 10 minutes at maximum heat. After ten minutes turn the oven down to 225
and bake for a further 30 minutes.

140
After 30 minutes, take the lid off of the Dutch oven and bake for a further 20 minutes,
or until the crust becomes nice and golden. I find sometimes gluten free loaves can
take a little longer than regular sourdough loaves, so just keep an eye on it.
Once your loaf is golden and the crust is hard, remove the it from the oven and let it
cool completely on a cooling rack before eating it (so hard to wait I know, but you
really have to wait with the gluten free bread!!).

141
142
Gluten free fruit galettes
You will find the non-gluten free version of this recipe later in the book. This is a nice
alternative to the traditional galette. This isn’t actually a sourdough recipe but it uses
the same gluten free flours you will have at home if you have been making gluten free
sourdough. You can make it with any fruit you like that is in season. These flours are
also low FODMAP, just make sure the fruit you choose is low FODMAP too if using
seasonal fruit, if you want it to be FODMAP friendly. This recipe makes about 8-10
galettes. They never last long in my house!

Ingredients for the dough:

225g butter (chilled)
100g buckwheat flour
100g brown rice flour
150g millet flour
50g sorghum
1tsp salt
190g sour cream
3 tbsp water
20g psyllium husk
7g flax seed meal
1 egg
Ingredients for the fruit:
2 punnets of strawberries (or an equivalent amount of other seasonal fruit)
90g white sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
1 pinch of nutmeg (optional)

Additional:
20g milk

Step 1: Mixing flour and butter

Take your butter and cut it into cubes. Measure out your gluten free flours: buckwheat,
brown rice, millet and sorghum and put them into a bowl. Add the salt to the bowl too.
Then tip your cubed butter in and use your fingers to mix the butter into the flour,
squishing it between your fingers until it forms a kind of lumpy crumble. The lumps of
butter should be about pea size.

Step 2: Mixing and then adding the sour cream

Measure out your sour cream and add the water to it. Mix to create a more fluid
mixture. Then add the egg and mix that in well. Then add your psyllium husk and flax
seed mixture and mix.

143
Step 3: Combining the two mixtures
Pour your sour cream mixture onto your butter and flour mixture and use a spoon to
incorporate the two together. Once it is starting to come together you can also use
your hands to make it into a nice dough with a similar consistency to shortbread or
cookie dough. Knead the dough with your hands (you can leave it in the bowl) for a
few minutes just to make sure all the ingredients are mixed in well.

Step 4: Into the fridge

Once all ingredients are well incorporated roll them into a ball and put them, inside the
bowl into the fridge and cover with glad wrap. Leave in the fridge for about 30 minutes.
This allows the butter to cool down and become hard again so that it’s easier to work
with.

Step 5: Rolling the dough out

Take the dough out of the fridge. It should be nice and firm. If it’s not, put it back in
and give it some more time to cool down.

Get a rolling pin, lightly flour your work surface with rice flour and roll out the dough to
about 1-0.5cm thickness, or as thin as you can get the dough before it starts to break
– which won’t be all that thin, don’t worry. It helps to also make the rolling pin a little
wet and then coat it with some rice flour too.

Step 6: Cutting circles

Once you’ve rolled out the dough, take a butter knife and cut your dough into circles
about the size of a small saucer. If you find the dough is becoming hard to work with,
this will be because it’s getting too warm and the butter is getting soft, so put it back in
the fridge for 15 or so minutes and then come back to it.
Once you have a circle (it doesn’t have to be perfectly round because you’re going to
fold in the edges soon anyway), coat it lightly with rice flour and put it onto a plate.
Then repeat. You can collect the edges that are left over from your circles and combine
them into a ball and roll that out again to make more circles until you’ve used up all
the mixture. You should be able to make about 10 circles.

Step 7: Into the fridge

Cover your circles with cling wrap or a wet tea towel and put into the fridge for at least
30 minutes.
If you want to prep these and make them the next day, you can leave them at this
point and continue preparing the next day.
144
Step 8: Making the fruit mixture
Take your strawberries and wash them, and then cut the tops off. Cut them into halves
and put them in a bowl. Add your sugar and cinnamon (and nutmeg if using) and stir
to combine. Then set aside.

Step 9: Building the galettes

This is the fun part! Take out your dough circles. Flour a surface and place one circle
onto the surface. Roll it out to get it as thin as possible without breaking. Then spoon
a spoonful or two of the fruit mixture onto the dough. Then fold in the edges of the
gallette, leaving the fruit visible in the middle.

Then use a spatula to scoop up the galette and put it onto a baking paper lined baking
tray. Repeat this process for each dough circle. Again, if the dough starts to get to
sticky during this process, put it back into the fridge for a bit.
Once you have built all of your galettes put them back into the fridge.

Now it is also time to preheat the oven to 180 degrees.

Step 10: Milk glaze and then baking

Once your oven has come up to 180 degrees, take your galettes out of the fridge.

Put a tiny bit of milk into a glass and use a pastry brush to brush milk onto the dough
of the galettes.
Then put the galettes into the oven. Bake for about 25-30 minutes at 180 degrees.
After 30 minutes, if they are golden just take them out. If they need a little longer, turn
the oven down to about 160 degrees and leave them for an additional 10 or so minutes,
until they are really golden on the outside.
Then take them out. Let them cool on the tray because they will be really soft when
they come out. Once they’ve cooled a little you can move them using a spatula onto a
cooling rack. Then allow to cool completely and enjoy.

They look lovely served with a little icing sugar sifted over the top.

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About this book
About @marygracebread and how this book and the
information in it came about

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About me, and Instagram, and this sourdough book

For those who are interested, for the most part of my life I am a PhD student and a
language teacher. Bread baking for me is very practical on one hand, because I love
bread and I eat a lot of it, and also enjoy being able to give it away to other people. On
the other hand, it is also an activity I found to be very comforting and grounding. It
gives you something to do with your hands and something to think about that’s not
work or a TV show or a phone notification. I think I almost enjoy the mindfulness of the
bread-making process more than the taste, which is saying a lot!
The information in this guide is an amalgamation of my own experience baking, as
well as searching for information on sourdough. I must admit, I never would have
expected Instagram or any other social media platform to be such a productive
platform for the exchange of knowledge and experiences on something like sourdough
bread! My knowledge of sourdough comes almost exclusively from Instagram, and the
websites, e-books and videos that I have been able to find through various sourdough
Instagram accounts. Here are some of the accounts whose videos, eBooks,
experiments, comments, suggestions and ideas I’ve learnt the most from:
• @jessica_prescott_ (made the IGTV video on sourdough during a COVID
lockdown that got me baking in the first place!!)
• @rosehillsourdough (provided a super informative eBook that I highly
recommend with many great sourdough recipes, a big influence on my own
techniques and general sourdough knowledge!)
• @trevorjaywilson (an amazing eBook if you’ve read all the other beginner’s
sourdough information and really want to get nerdy about all the details! It’s
basically a PhD thesis on bread.)
• @michaeljamesbakes (author of excellent cookbook The Tivoli Road Baker,
which has so many amazing bread and pasty recipes, I very highly recommend
both the Instagram account and the cookbook)
• @elaine_foodbod (very helpful, detailed sourdough info and FAQs available
online for free.)
• @siamesesourdough (for more cats and bread!! And interesting bread
experiments as well!)
There are so many other knowledgeable bakers that I have connected with through
Instagram who I have learnt so much from! I really have found Instagram to be an
excellent way to ask questions and learn more about baking. I have received so many
helpful tips and great ideas.
I am so very grateful to all of these people who have provided input and resources for
creating delicious bread and learning more about it! There is just such a wealth of
creativity and knowledge out there, it’s so excellent to be a part of the ever-curious
sourdough community.
I hope that this book helps you to make good bread!
Contact me via @marygracebread on Instagram or mary@marygracebread.com.au
if you have any feedback or questions!
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one last bread-life-hack: the ultimate hangover cure – two toast (with Vegemite),
two Panadol and two glasses of water

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You can use the code BREAD2021 at checkout to get 100%
discount and download the latest version of the ebook for free.
Happy Baking!! <3

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